Christopher Peak Photo
Mila Nishball, 97, who fled Czechoslovakia after the Nazi occupation.
As a child growing up near Prague, Mila Nishball saw her weekly trips to the synagogue as a chance to gab with her girlfriends rather than to participate in her family’s religious tradition.
But today, Nishball still tears up when she recalls visiting the site in the late 1980s to discover that the synagogue was gone. It had been torn down by the Nazis after she’d gone into hiding and then fled Czechoslovakia with help from an American-born boy.
“I cried so much,” she said, “because this place that had meant nothing once was now so important to me.”
Nishball, a recent arrival at Tower One-Tower East who’s going on 97 years old, thought back to those searing memories on Thursday as Mayor Toni Harp arrived at the assisted-living facility to sign a proclamation remembering the Holocaust on an annual day marking the tragedy.
During World War II the Nazis murdered six million Jews in an attempt to to wipe out Jewish people and several other ethnic groups like Romani and Slavic peoples, while also persecuting people with disabilities, gays and lesbians, religious groups and political dissidents.
Mayor Toni Harp signs Holocaust Proclamation Friday.
Nishball didn’t talk publicly about what she’d endured, but she had a five-page account of her memories that she had stashed in a compartment in her walker.
She remembered being a 17-year-old, recently kicked out of school by Nazi orders, when her parents set her up with a 21-year-old, New York-born orphan who’d managed to apply for an American passport just in time. Her parents agreed to pay for the voyage to America, as long as he’d take their daughter.
A few days after meeting at a coffee shop, they married at City Hall. Even though it was arranged out of necessity and they slept in separate rooms for two months, they eventually fell in love.
He eventually left to get a job in America so he could pay for her to follow him. But while Nishball waited for her immigration papers to arrive, the Nazis shut down the family business, confiscated their truck and car and ordered them out of their home. “These are only material things we are leaving,” Nishball’s mom said. “We still have each other.”
They moved into a Jewish ghetto, three families to a room, where she’d be stuck for a year and a half. Her old classmates used to smuggle food to her through the gates, defying the German occupiers.
But the Gestapo, the secret police, made arrests daily. One day they tried to frame Nishball’s father for swearing at them. She found him bruised in the courtyard, nearly dead. All he could say was that he’d refused to admit the charges against him.
Her father died the next day. Only Nishball, with her American passport, was allowed to go to the crematorium in Prague, where they played the Czech national anthem as his body burned to ashes.
Just when she’d given up hope, the visa arrived. Her mother snuck into the city with her to see her off on a train to Lisbon. They couldn’t bring themselves to say “goodbye,” so they just said “so long.”
Gustave Keach-Longo, CEO of The Towers, kicks off the ceremony.
After a 10-day trek across the Atlantic, Nishball arrived in New York City to meet her husband, spent her first night at a moviehouse where she couldn’t understand a word, and then made her way to Bridgeport. They eventually had a baby boy.
“I loved my little boy, but I knew nothing about bringing up a baby. None of my friends had children yet. Every time he would cry, I would cry with him. I also cried for myself. I didn’t like this country, this America,” Nishball had written. “I wanted to be back home where my child would have grandparents that loved him and give me a helping hand. I missed my country and who could I confide in? Everybody would say, ‘You should kiss the ground you’re walking on — this country saved your life!’ I tried but it didn’t help.
“It’s funny how you can forget the bad things and only remember the good. When I thought of home, I didn’t think of the crowded ghetto, the arrest, and the restriction laws. All I thought of was my sweet home and the family I would go back to when the war was over,” she went on.
“Then the war was over, and I found out there was nobody and nothing to go back to,” Nishball concluded. “That’s the time I became a realist. There was no sense in longing for something that could never be. That’s the time I realized that life here isn’t so bad after all. Get on with your life. My family, my friends are here. That’s the time that I realized that maybe this America is the best country in the world. That’s the time I became an American.”
For years, Nishball said she couldn’t talk about what happened to her. She couldn’t relive it. But over time, she told her kids. “They should know,” she said.
Norman Feitelson and Izzy Juda read the poem “We Remember Them.”
As she had a piece of coffee cake, Nishball said that she hadn’t noticed a rise in anti-Semitism recently, especially not with her liberal friends in her old Bridgeport condo. She did say that Yale’s former quotas for Jewish applicants probably kept her daughter out of the university.
“I haven’t heard about that,” Nishball said. “Maybe I didn’t want to know.”
Another Holocaust survivor at Tower One-Tower East, Izzy Juda (who recently spoke about his experience to a class at John C. Daniels School) said he hopes that the next generations don’t forget after the last living reminders are gone.
“People can become stagnant,” he said. “People can forget. But I hope they don’t.”