Esther Begam, born July 2, 1928, Chrzanow, Poland, left. When the German army entered Poland in 1939 Esther Reicher was only 11 years old. Her father Mordechai, a well-respected rabbi, was away serving as a chaplain in the Polish army. Esther, her mother, older sister and little brother were caught by the tightening grip of the Nazi war machine. Esther was the only member of her family to survive. Leo Weiss, Dec. 6, 1924 - Sept. 30, 2015, Drohobycz, Poland, right. Leo was about to be shipped out to what he knew would be certain death. He bravely told the commanding officer that he wouldn't leave without his wife, who was in the next cell. Leo wasn't married, but his schoolmate, a beautiful young girl was in the next cell. Surprisingly, the officer let them both stay behind, thereby escaping death.
David Sherman makes his living photographing some of Minnesota's most elite athletes. But it was a small group of Twin Cities senior citizens who taught him lessons on power and grace.
They were Holocaust survivors. Sherman said he felt compelled for years to get the aging survivors to tell their stories and be photographed. He recalls as a child witnessing a sorrowful dedication of a Holocaust Memorial in Sioux City, Iowa.
In 2010, he connected with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas and began the project that became "Transfer of Memory," highlighting portraits of Twin Cities survivors. The exhibit has been shown at colleges, churches and synagogues throughout Minnesota.
Sherman said a call out to local synagogues found people willing to tell their stories. Curators Laura Zelle and Susie Greenberg brought on writer Lili Chester, the daughter of survivors.
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"You see that there are all kinds of survivors. Those that left early, those that left Germany in the mid-1930s, those that left after Kristallnacht in 1938, those that went to Shanghai and those that survived the camps. It's important to me not to make any distinctions between survivors."
Sherman, the team photographer for the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx, said he wanted to show survivors "not as victims but as people who are heroes, really, who had gone through this horrific experience and picked up and started over and created a life. And I wanted to show them as full of life and not as defined by victimhood.
"For me," he added, "the experience was very humbling."
There is a Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) Commemoration Thursday evening at 7 p.m. at Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul.
Correction (April 12, 2018): Laura Zelle's name was misspelled in an earlier version of this story.
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Curtis Hort, May 3, 1921 - Aug. 18, 2015, Berlin-Kaulsdors, Germany. In 1939 they were unable to obtain papers to enter the U.S., so Hort and his family fled to Shanghai. Between 1938 and 1941 thousands of refugees found temporary refuge in this Japanese occupied Chinese city. Alix Kowler, Oct. 30, 1924 - Dec. 12, 2016, Vienna, Austria. Kowler was happily living in Vienna when in 1938 German troops marched into Austria and the country became a part of Hitler's Third Reich. The persecution of Austria's Jews began almost immediately and many Jews fled the country. Although Kowler begged her parents to leave, they had no intention of doing so. Finally in 1940 she was allowed to join friends in Antwerp. At the age of 14 Kowler began a solo journey that would not end until her liberation in 1944.
David Sherman
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Esther Begam, born July 2, 1928, Chrzanow, Poland, left. When the German army entered Poland in 1939 Esther Reicher was only 11 years old. Her father Mordechai, a well-respected rabbi, was away serving as a chaplain in the Polish army. Esther, her mother, older sister and little brother were caught by the tightening grip of the Nazi war machine. Esther was the only member of her family to survive. Leo Weiss, Dec. 6, 1924 - Sept. 30, 2015, Drohobycz, Poland, right. Leo was about to be shipped out to what he knew would be certain death. He bravely told the commanding officer that he wouldn't leave without his wife, who was in the next cell. Leo wasn't married, but his schoolmate, a beautiful young girl was in the next cell. Surprisingly, the officer let them both stay behind, thereby escaping death.
David Sherman | JCRC
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Eva Gross, born Dec. 6, 1927, and Ella Weiss, March 3, 1910 - Jan. 20, 2011, from Hungary, left. The story of Ella Weiss and her daughter, Eva Gross, is a tale of the devotion of a mother and daughter who together survived deportation from their small Hungarian town, six concentration camps including Auschwitz, forced labor, death marches, and finally liberation. Max Goodman, born Nov. 23, 1923, Radautz, Romania and Edith Goodman, born Sept. 11, 1931, Krischatik, Romania. In 1939 when the war between Poland and Germany began, bombs fell on Edith Goodman's hometown. At first her parents thought that they should stay, but a Romanian official who knew the family warned them to leave. "He said, 'I don't care where, just go!'"
