Fred Jarvis remembers too much, or so he says. He can speak in detail about his own experiences in Nazi concentration camps, but ask him to recall specific scenes and his descriptions grow guarded.
“It was a constant issue of survival, hour to hour, looking for something to eat. But there was nothing to eat,” said Jarvis, 72. “I remember the horror, the hunger, the desperation.”
Jarvis, who has lived in Bristol for 15 years, is one of 64 Tennesseans (and the only one from the state’s northeast corner) whose Holocaust memories make up an exhibit currently at the Reece Museum at East Tennessee State University.
“Living On: Portraits of Tennessee Survivors and Liberators,” a project of the Tennessee Holocaust Commission, features portraits and stories of individuals who lived through the Holocaust or, as U.S. soldiers, helped liberate the camps. Since opening last month, attendance has been “packed,” according to Museum Director Theresa Burchett. This is the exhibit’s last stop on a two-year statewide tour, ending Nov. 29.
The project, featuring photos by Robert Heller and interviews by journalist Dawn Weiss Smith, was created to help people remember or learn about the Holocaust, as the generation that lived through it passes away. That purpose appealed to Jarvis, who started talking about his experiences only in the last few years.
“I’m a survivor,” he said, “and I’m obligated to be a witness.”
Jarvis was 5 years old in 1940 when he and his parents were sent to labor camps in Nazi-controlled Vichy France. They escaped and hid for almost a year but were recaptured. When Jarvis was 7, his parents were transported to Auschwitz and killed. He escaped that same fate because a 17-year-old girl, a complete stranger, came to the camp the day before they were taken away.
“She told my mother that where they were going was not good. ‘Give me your child,’ she said,” Jarvis recalled. “Mother handed me over. Imagine what that must have been like, but my mother saved both her children.” (His brother had been sent to England for refuge in 1939.)
The girl worked with OSE – Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, or the Society for the Rescue of Children. This humanitarian organization saved some 5,000 Jewish children during World War II by caring for them in orphanages and hiding them with sympathizers in rural French homes. Future Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel was among those children. So was Jarvis, who was living with an elderly woman near Lyon, posing as her nephew, when American troops arrived in late 1944.
“The GIs gave us everything we never had – chocolate, peanut butter, chewing gum,” he remembered. “And to be free was the greatest day in my life. Here was a child who never had a childhood; all I knew was war. Suddenly I was free. It was indescribable, exhilarating.”
After the war, OSE gathered the orphans and, as Jarvis put it, “tried to bring us back to normalcy as much as possible,” providing medical care and education. The intensive lessons included Scripture and Hebrew.
“That was the beginning of my religion,” he said. “OSE instilled Judaism in me.”
Throughout the war, Jarvis never had a chance to learn much about his religion.
“I just knew that I was being hunted because I was Jewish,” he said. “I knew only what was happening to me, and that it was evil.”
After the war, Jarvis came to live with an aunt in New York City, where he lived for more than 40 years. There he eventually met his wife of 23 years, Mary, who is from Bristol, and family ties brought them to this area. Today he works as a commercial photographer and is a leader in the B’nai Sholom synagogue.
“I know there are Holocaust survivors who don’t believe in God,” he said, “but I’m not one of them. Most of those I know have a strong faith in God.”
After the horrors they witnessed, how can that be?
“How can it not be?” he replied. He quoted Wiesel, who visited Bristol in 2004 as part of B’nai Sholom’s centennial, which Jarvis organized. “We all should have been animals, but we were brought back to being human beings.”
Originally published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 20 October 2007.
Top photo: Children at Rivesalte concentration camp, one of two camps where Jarvis and his family were held. The other camp was nearby Gurs.
Bottom photo: Jarvis’portrait in “Living On,” by Robert Heller (University of Tennessee-Knoxville).
