By Doug Geed
It's a movie I think everyone should be made to watch -- Schindler's List. It personalizes the horrors of the Holocaust in a powerful way. And if you've seen it, you know the ending -- when the real survivors are shown on screen.
Every time I see the movie, I want to jump into that scene and give every one of those people a hug. And that's exactly the way I felt covering a news conference this morning at Long Island Jewish Hillside Medical Center in New Hyde Park.
Taking center stage was Shunkale Stermer. (Her first name is pronounced "shoonk-uh-luh.")
The Long Island woman is a Holocaust survivor but told a story I've never heard. She hid, with about three dozen other people, inside a cave in the Ukraine for nearly a year. Actually, it was two caves. The Nazis discovered the first cave. Shunkale, who was only 8 at the time, remembers how everyone was petrified when someone came running to the back area of the cave and said "The Germans are here!" Shunkale says her very brave grandmother went to talk to the Germans to convince them to leave the people alone. A ploy, in reality, to stall them so that the rest of the family could escape. It didn't work -- they had to leave, but during it, they amazingly were able to get away from the Nazis and found a second, larger underground cave farther in the woods.
They entered through a hole in the ground, slid and crawled for 60-feet in a 3-foot wide opening until they reached a larger area where more than three dozen people from five families lived.
The women and children, including Shunkale, were never allowed to go outside. They never saw the sun or smelled fresh air. It was so dark under the earth you couldn't see your finger right in front of your face. Candles were their only light. Potatoes from area farm fields was their primary source of food. Some feathers and straw were their pillows.
38 people went into that cave -- 38 came out alive.
Shunkale is now 73 years old. She has three children and three grandchildren and will be among 40 people who are going back -- for the first time -- to the cave. She says no one ever knew where they were. After they left, the cave was abandoned and forgotten. In 1993, a "caver" (a person who explores caves) re-discovered it and found buttons, shoes and the names of families scratched into the walls.
LIJ is supplying doctors and medical supplies for the trip and a film crew will be along for a future documentary.
An amazing story of survival. And Shunkale says it was all made possible by the strength of her family. "We're all we had."
Check out this site for more information.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/05/0527_040527_grottosurvivors.html
And if you ever run into Shunkale Stermer, she deserves a hug.