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Martin Small, 1916-2008

In infinitely cruel ways, Martin Small’s life was defined by the Holocaust. In 1942, when Poles murdered 3,500 Jews in Molczadz, Poland, he lost 84 family members, including his mother and sisters. While Small escaped the fate of his family that day, he did not escape his own fate. For the next three years, he wandered half-starved through fields, was caught by the Nazis, deported to a labor camp, escaped. He then found temporary refuge with a Polish family that hid Jews beneath a trap door in their farmhouse. Once, when the Nazis pounded on the door and questioned the woman who lived there, she denied that any Jews were there. A Nazi broke her leg with a rifle. When he demanded again whether she was hiding Jews, she said no. The Nazi broke her other leg. She didn’t scream until the Nazis left. Small decided to leave the farmhouse because “I just couldn’t do it to these people anymore,” he told the IJN in a 2004 interview. He ended up at Mauthausen.

Martin Small said he had no memory of the day the Americans liberated Mauthausen in 1945. “We were dead people,” he said. “We didn’t realize what liberty is. We were not human.”

After liberation, Small set off for Italy. Standing on the brink of the future, he couldn’t stop thinking about the Polish woman who hid him. “Every moment of my life,” he told the IJN, “I thanked her and I thanked G-d. But I asked myself:Would I have done this?” Before he could answer, three women approached him –– a woman, her daughter and the grandmother. The woman asked Mr. Small whether he was in Mauthausen. “Yes.” “Then you won’t talk to me,” said the woman, who admitted she was the wife of one of the top Nazi guards in the camp. Still, she asked him to help get daughter and mother safely to Italy. “When she told me this, I didn’t see her,” he told the IJN. “I saw my mother and my two sisters. I knew they were dead, but sometimes, you don’t believe the things you know. Every woman can look like your mother.” He introduced the women to a Russian officer at the train station. “I said to him, ‘This is my mother, my grandmother and my sister. Please help them.’” The women made it safely to Italy, and Martin Small had his answer.

Mordechai Schmulevicz died on Nov. 29, 2008, at the age of 91. His survival against the odds in the Holocaust could be the end of this story. But it actually was just the beginning. In the 1980s, not having taken a single lesson, Small became an artist. Most of his art mirrored the Holocaust. But the joy it gave him, and people throughout the world, was a triumphant victory over the Nazis.

Earlier this year, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he took 30 years worth of written reflections on the Holocaust and published a memoir, Remember Us. Frail and terminally ill, he would not surrender to death until he finished the book. He donated all the proceeds from Remember Us to Bonai Shalom, his Boulder synagogue, so it could purchase a new Torah scroll.

Jews constantly utter the phrase “from generation to generation.” For this diminutive and gracious man who witnessed so much horror, ensuring Jewish continuance was a personal mission.

Martin Small, who had piercing blue eyes, stared into hell and remembered it, painted it, wrote it. He was a survivor in the truest sense, inspiring us to find our own light despite the darkness.

Read the IJN’s obituary notice for Martin Small.


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