CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Thursday is Holocaust Remembrance Day, or “Yom Hashoah” as it is called in Hebrew.

The day of remembrance marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Days of Remembrance in the United States run from the Sunday before to the Sunday after, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

The Warsaw ghetto’s month of fighting is considered the first popular uprising in a Nazi-controlled city in Europe and took place in 1943, according to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

After mass deportations, the remaining Jewish population in the Warsaw ghetto violently resisted the attempts of the Nazis to deport the remaining residents to work and death camps, according to Vashem. Ultimately, the ghetto burned to the ground.

What You Need To Know

Holocaust survivor Irving Bienstock tells his story several times a week

His retellings are part of the Levine Jewish Community Center's Butterfly Project, which remembers the Holocaust 

Bienstock and his immediate family escaped the Nazi regime in the late 1930s 

Now, almost 80 years later, work continues to make sure the stories, testimonies and experiences of the Holocaust are not forgotten, especially as the country and world mark 2022’s Yom Hashoah. 

Here in Charlotte, one survivor is doing what he can to make sure his stories and personal experience with the early days of the Holocaust help future generations avoid the same fate.

Irving Bienstock, 95, was born and raised in Dortmund, Germany. Since retiring in 2000, Bienstock said he has a new mission in retirement.

“I feel that I am doing something to prevent this from happening again,” Bienstock said.

He spends many days at the Levine Jewish Community Center in Charlotte, retelling a particular part of his life story.

“Once I’m gone, nobody will know what the Nazis did to us,” Bienstock added.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, his story takes on even more meaning as he tries to ensure the horrors of yesterday do not become the horrors of tomorrow.

“What I try to tell the people is that if they are subject to any type of discrimination, that they not keep quiet, that they speak up about it. It is against the law, and that they do something about it,” Bienstock said.

Staff said they conduct workshops at the center three days a week, and Bienstock talks to two of those groups each week. Another survivor speaks to the third group. 

“I’m very fortunate to have met a group of people here that are helping me to do that,” Bienstock said.

In 2011, the center started having schools visit the campus regularly, meaning about 6,000 students a year come to visit and hear stories of survival. On days when he tells his story, Bienstock addresses about 100 students at a time.

“Once I made the decision after [retiring], I got a teacher someplace, and he invited me to come to talk to his class, and I guess the word got around,” Bienstock said with a chuckle. “Other teachers would call me and ask me to come to their class and tell my story.”

Eventually, word of his classroom visits reached the LJCC, and staff asked him to become an official part of their local Butterfly Project, a Holocaust remembrance program. 

Since then, students across the region have listened to Bienstock’s story and been able to ask questions about how he and his immediate family survived the Holocaust. Bienstock, his mom, dad and sister all survived and escaped the Nazi regime. 

Escaping Nazi Germany

Bienstock said he remembered being a young boy and playing with friends, until Adolf Hitler came to power.

“I went downstairs, outside, to play with the other kids, and they told me, ‘My mother’ or, ‘My father told me you’re a [in German] dirty Jew, and I can’t play with you anymore. And, they spit on me,” Bienstock recalled. 

In the following years, from 1933 to 1938, Bienstock said new German laws stripped their rights to go to German schools, movie theaters and other businesses. Bienstock was unable to finish his education, and the situation in Germany became more hostile.

“It changed my life. I wasn’t a child anymore,” he said.

For example, in 1938 Bienstock said the German police and the Nazis came to collect Jewish Polish citizens living in Germany to deport and send back to Poland.

“My grandmother, all my uncles, my cousins, most of my family were arrested that morning. They were put on trains and dropped off at the Polish border. And, actually I never saw them again,” Bienstock said.

His mother, originally mistaken for a Polish citizen, was able to talk a police officer into rechecking the records, and he let her stay in the country with the children. 

A short time later, in early November, the situation further deteriorated for Bienstock and his family.

“Ninth of November, 1938, and we realized immediately that we were in big trouble,” Bienstock said.

It was the start of Kristallnacht, when groups of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers gathered in towns and cities across Germany and started attacking Jewish residents and damaging property.

“I got up, and I looked out, and I saw the mobs. They were yelling out, [in German] ‘Out with the Jews and exterminate them!'” Bienstock said about the November evening from his childhood. “There was a synagogue halfway down the block on the other side, it was burning.”

Members of the group came into the house where Bienstock and his family lived in an apartment. However, a neighbor who was Christian told the gathered group all the Jewish residents had already been deported. They left, but came back later the following morning and ransacked the Bienstocks' apartment.

From then on, Bienstock said they tried to stay home, stopped going to school and only ventured out for food and medicine. Eventually, a man came to the apartment and said he was the new owner of the house, evicting them. It was then, Bienstock said, his mother determined it was becoming too dangerous for Bienstock and his sister, Sylvia, to stay.

“My mother took my sister and dressed her up in warm clothing and packed a little suitcase for her, and bought a ticket for her to go to Amsterdam, to Holland,” Bienstock said. 

His father had already fled Germany and made it to Belgium, and his 10-year-old sister would have needed a visa to cross the border and head to Amsterdam. 

“She walked through the train and asked people if they would take my sister into Holland. Fortunately, there was a very kind Dutch woman on the train that had a girl, my sister’s age, marked in her passport. And, she said she would take my sister, as her daughter, into Holland,” Bienstock detailed. 

Bienstock successfully made the trip a short time later using the same technique, but there was no one who agreed to take him over the border. After being detained, Bienstock was allowed to enter the country and was sent to a camp on the coast. The camp was filled with other Jewish children who had escaped Germany. He was also reunited with his sister.

At the same time in 1939, his mother escaped Germany herself, needing two attempts to cross illegally into Belgium, like her husband had done.

Eventually, in 1940, Bienstock’s father secured the family visas to America after first applying in 1933. They were reunited in Brooklyn later the same year.

“It was awesome, it was awesome, that the four of us were together again,” Bienstock said with a smile. “Four weeks after we came, Hitler invaded Holland. Had we stayed another four weeks, we would not have been here.”

The family followed the news as the war in Europe enveloped the continent. Despite his mother’s objection, Bienstock joined the United States Army after turning 18, but did not see combat before the war ended.

“I passed through the Strait of Gibraltar exactly five years after I boarded the ship in Holland,” Bienstock recalled.

After serving in the Army another year, he went back home and started working. Eventually, he married his wife, Lillian ,and became a plant manager. When the plant moved to Monroe, North Carolina, Bienstock decided to follow. 

Bienstock and Lillian were married 69 years.

“She was a Brooklyn girl,” he added.

They had no children, and both Sylvia and Lillian have since passed away. 

“All the rest of my family all perished. I don’t have any relatives,” Bienstock said of the Holocaust’s toll. “I still think about it.” 

Sharing his story

Bienstock said he never talked about what happened to his family until retiring in 2000, when he realized his stories would disappear with him if he did not start sharing them.

“Six million people, Jewish people, were murdered for no other reason than they were Jewish,” he said.

So for 22 years, he’s traveled to schoolchildren and they have traveled to him, sharing a story of survival and a warning on the dangers of hate. 

“I feel that I am doing something to prevent it from happening again. And, I believe it could happen again. But we live in a wonderful country where it is illegal to discriminate against other people, yet it is happening. And, I want people to know what could happen,” Bienstock warned.

His storytelling is now an official part of the LJCC Butterfly Project, where schoolchildren are educated about the Holocaust and hate and visit the center’s Butterfly Garden Holocaust Memorial.

Since Charlotte’s LJCC joined the Butterfly Project in 2008, North Carolina schoolchildren have painted thousands of ceramic butterflies, which will one day help represent the 1.5 million children murdered in the Holocaust. The program consists of a two and a half hour workshop for middle school students, who take a field trip to Shalom Park in Charlotte, according to the center. During the workshop, students paint a ceramic butterfly and learn the child’s name they are honoring.

Since the worldwide Butterfly Project’s last official annual report in 2020, more than 250,000 butterflies have been painted around the world.