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Educator and musician Irv Lubliner of Ashland retired from Southern Oregon University in 2014 after teaching mathematics for forty years, working with every grade from kindergarten through graduate school. He recently edited and published his mother’s writing and oral presentation transcripts about her experiences living through the ghettos and concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Born in 1922 in Poland, Felicia Bornstein Lubliner was deported from the Lodz Ghetto to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944, and later to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. After liberation from the camps, she married Abram Lubliner, who she met at a camp for displaced persons, and the couple made their way to Oakland, California. She died in 1974.

The book, for which Irv wrote the foreword and afterword, is Only Hope: A Survivor’s Stories of the Holocaust, published by Felabra Press.

Ed Battistella: Tell us about your mother.

Felicia Bornstein Lubliner

Irv Lubliner: My mother was one of eight children and grew up in a household that also included her grandmother. She was the only member of that large family to survive the Holocaust. While we might refer to her as “the lucky one,” she felt tremendous guilt about being the only survivor, always wondering what she might have differently to help the others stay alive.

Once in the United States, she began to study English (probably at Laney College in Oakland, though I was too young to have paid attention). I don’t know what compelled her to start writing about her Holocaust experiences, but it may be that she felt a moral obligation to see to it that the horrors she survived were not “swept under the rug,” that the world would come to grips with what had taken place, and that no such thing would ever happen again.

Though my parents, in keeping with Jewish tradition, lit memorial candles for their lost loved ones, the names of those deceased relatives were never spoken in my home, and there was no talk of what they had experienced. My mom and dad seemed determined to give me a “normal” American upbringing, without my fearing that my life, my education, and my sense of security would be disrupted as theirs had been. She wrote the stories that I compiled in the book and spoke each year to a class studying the Holocaust at San Francisco State University, but she and I never had an adult conversation about her life prior to coming to the U.S. At the time of her death, she was only 51, and I was 21.

EB: Given that your mother passed away in the 1970s, I’m wondering why you chose this moment to put her remembrances and speeches together as a book.

IL: For about thirty years, I’ve been visiting school classrooms (from middle school on up) to share my mother’s writing, reading the stories aloud and engaging students in conversation about them. I would often have parents contact me afterwards, telling me that their children had spoken of the stories at home and asking if they, the parents, could read them. I received tremendous encouragement—from students, teachers, and parents—to get the stories published, and have lived with that goal in mind for a very long time. I wanted to contribute something to the work, reflecting on my own experience as the child of two Holocaust survivors. It wasn’t until 2014 and my retirement from SOU that I, with the help of two writing coaches, finally wrote something that lived up to my own standards and that said what I felt needed to be said. Within the last year, I created my own publishing company, Felabra Press (honoring my parents by using a juxtaposition of their names, Felicia and Abram), and the book became available in May of this year.

A few days ago, I received an unsolicited testimonial comment from an Emeritus Professor of European History, Edward Gosselin, which read: “This is the most moving book I have ever read about the Holocaust and about Auschwitz.” This reflects my mother’s effectiveness as a writer and demonstrates that her stories have something to offer to all, those who have studied the Holocaust extensively and those who know little or nothing about it.

EB: All of the narratives were very heart-rending but I was especially horrified at the “Concert at Auschwitz,” which was published in the San Francisco Chronicle. Had you read any of your mother’s writings as you were growing up?

IL: No, I have no recollection of reading that story (which appeared in a Sunday supplement to the SF Chronicle in 1961) or any of the others while I was growing up. By the time I was old enough to read and appreciate them, I was a rebellious teenager, constantly trying to keep my distance from my parents and do “my own thing,” and I passed on the opportunity. When we got word of my mother’s terminal cancer in 1974, I was a senior at U.C. Berkeley, no longer living at home. That would have been a good time for a conversation with my mother about her experiences, but I knew that would be a painful conversation, and it was not one that I chose to initiate.

Getting back to “Concert at Auschwitz,” I think it’s worth noting that its publication came within twelve years of my mother’s arrival in this country and is written in English, which was, for her, a new language. All of the stories in Only Hope are written in English and readers often comment about how skillfully she wrote.

EB: Your father also survived imprisonment in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. But he responded much differently—you said he only spit when the topic came up. What did you make of his reactions?

IL: In the foreword, I mention a specific incident in which my father spit on a German postage stamp from the time of the Nazi regime, one that bore Hitler’s picture and a swastika. It made an indelible impression on me because it was so rare to see my father show any emotional response or share information about what he had endured, what he had lost, or how his experiences had scarred him. I only saw my father spit on that one occasion, but it was powerful. It saddens me that he never found a way to release the grief and bitterness that he must have felt.

EB: What was it like to edit your mother’s stories?

IL: Though my mother wrote in English, not in her native language, Polish, her stories did not require any editing. My role as editor was really limited to deciding in what order the stories should appear in the book and choosing which of two drafts of a given story would be used. While I was a child, she took classes to learn English, mastering not only the language, but also the craft of writing a short story. One more thing I’ll mention: She was a force to be reckoned with if you played Scrabble with her. Her vocabulary was much more extensive than the typical person raised in this country and speaking English since childhood.

EB: How can people get a copy of Only Hope?

IL: I have chosen not to turn the book over to the big-name booksellers such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Instead, it is being sold through my website, onlyhopebook.com, various Holocaust museums and education centers, and at a number of independent bookstores (including Bloomsbury Books in Ashland, Rebel Heart Books in Jacksonville, and Oregon Books in Grants Pass).

I hope that the book will find its way into school classrooms, and I am offering a 25% discount to educators ordering twelve or more copies.

EB: Besides the website mentioned above, is there any other place people can get more information about the book?

IL: I was recently interviewed on our local NPR radio station on the Jefferson Exchange program. Anyone interested in hearing the interview can do so by visiting this site:

https://www.ijpr.org/post/local-author-publishes-mothers-memories-holocaust#stream/0

EB: Oregon recently passed legislation requiring school districts to provide instruction specifically about the Holocaust. What other books or resources on the Holocaust would you recommended?

IL: I am very pleased that Holocaust- and genocide-related instruction is now a mandated part of the curriculum here in Oregon. What people might not realize is that the push for that legislation came from a high school student in Lake Oswego, Claire Sarnowski, who was inspired to contact her district’s state Senator after a Holocaust survivor visited her school back when she was in 4^th grade. This illustrates how impacting stories such as those my mother wrote can be on younger learners. By the way, I sent Claire an inscribed copy of Only Hope, thanking her for her efforts to see to it that the stories of the Holocaust would be passed on to her generation and those that will follow.

In recent years I have been immersing myself in Holocaust-related books, articles, and films, so I could easily compile a long list, and it is difficult to narrow it down. Here is an attempt to do so, focusing on titles that your readers may have missed:

• Maus 1: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History and Maus 2: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman
• The Cap: The Price of a Life,,, by Roman Frister
• Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization, by Nicholson Baker
• Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky
• The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by John Boyne (both the book and the film)
• Sarah’s Key, by by Tatiana de Rosnay (both the book and the film)
• Shoah, by Claude Lanzmann (both the book and the film)

I’m sure I’ll soon remember something else that deserved to be on that list!

EB: Thanks for talking with us and thanks for what you are doing.

IL: I appreciate this opportunity to share information about Only Hope: A Survivor’s Stories of the Holocaust. Thank you very much, Ed.

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David A. Oas is Professor Emeritus of psychology at Southern Oregon University, having retired in 1997 to continue private practice as a clinical and forensic psychologist. In the 1970s he attended the University of Southern California Film School and wrote, produced and directed the film Raspberry Heaven now available as an Amazon Instant Video.

He is the author of the books Blurred Realities (2018), Non-Official Cover Confessions, Book One (2019) and Non-Official Cover Confessions, Book Two (2019, in press). You can follow his work at www.roguefilmsandbooks.com.

Ed Battistella: You’ve had an interesting career as clinical psychologist, screenwriter and a professor at Southern Oregon University. What inspired you to become a novelist?

David Oas: I wouldn’t call myself a novelist. I decided I would do an experiment in storytelling by expanding upon the limitations of screenplay writing to reveal character development through action, dialogue, and character reflections by the three main protagonists. I used the omniscient voice to give the storytelling breadth, depth and brevity. I chose to cut out physical descriptions of characters, and instead leveraged the ways characters acted so the readers could tap into my fictional world.

EB: How is writing a screenplay is different than writing a novel?

DO: Screenplays are written where setting, action, character name and dialogue move the story forward from one scene to the next. In directing my first feature film (Raspberry Heaven), each actor after selection by gender, age range, and informal interviews from a pool of actors, would take the script home overnight and come back the next day to do video-taped readings from selected scenes. Each actor chosen to play their part in the movie during production is then a part of my modified imagination as writer and director—often ending with contextual changes in the story I originally crafted. In collaboration with the cinematographer, scenes changed, new sides (script changes) were written revising actor’s dialogue, action sequences, and even settings (locations) based on time, weather and money. Movie making is a collaborative process unless you are writing only to sell screenplays.

I realized when writing my expanded story (somewhere between screenplay and historical fiction), my imagined characters kept changing with the environment on hand, i.e., much like a screenplay written for movie production. When writing historical fiction, my struggles with character interactions based on my emotions while writing were much the same as when writing screenplays. However, now I had the freedom (option) to write the actors (characters) reflections or escapes to the God upstairs, to complete a scene. This left me feeling less restricted in storytelling.

EB: What inspired you to write about the Vietnam War in Non-Official Cover Confessions?

DO: The real inspiration was to write a much longer story that begins with the Free Speech Movement at UC/Berkeley December 2, 1964 and ending with the Iran/Contra Affair in 1987.

Non-Official Cover Confessions includes the Secret War in Laos, the Fall of Saigon, the

Disappearances of subversives in Argentina, the Dirty War and death squads in Nicaragua, and the Hostage Crisis in Lebanon.

Specifically, about the Vietnam War: I was a Navy pilot in training in 1957 which ended two years later when I refused to accept my wings and commission. I had a quarrel with the Admiral of the base. Enough said. Some of my pilot friends ended up in Vietnam.

When I began my career as a psychology professor at Southern Oregon University and as a licensed clinical psychologist, many Vietnam veterans and their families became my counselees and patients.

EB: Explain the book’s title. What is a “Non-Official Cover Agent?”

DO: In my story, Non-Official Cover Agents are CIA-hired operatives with no guidance from the CIA. The chain of command is vertical. All operatives live by code names or false identities only known to the individual who passes on the orders to the agent. All actions are classified with identities essentially erased after completion of the mission. Historically speaking, President Eisenhower began the Non-Official Cover classified secret program with a special group in 1957 (later identified as the 303 and 40 Committee) that has continued with all U.S. presidents through 1987, the year these two books end.

EB: How much of the books are drawn from personal experience?

DO: My best answer is that I lived through the period from 1964-1987. There was a hot war that ended and a cold war still going on.

EB: Does being a psychologist help inform your writing?

DO: Yes. I’m wedded to character development. Early in writing screenplays and books, I recognized I could not escape my life as a psychologist. I have lived my life in the midst of conscious and unconscious contradictions of others and myself. I have observed and experienced how the verities of love, sex, friendship and belonging get twisted by fears of intimacy, inadequacy, rejection, estrangement and finally loss of control over our lives.

If the reader is seeking psychological realism and truthfulness in human action, I hope they find that experience in reading Non-Official Cover Confessions: Books One and Two.

EB: The novel presents many different political opinions of the Vietnam war. Was it important for you to present a moral dilemma of sorts?

DO: Let’s include human rights violations with moral dilemmas. That’s the spine of both books. The historical events spanning the time between 1964-1987 remain divisive to this day. Some still say, “we should never have sent soldiers to Vietnam.” Others, “we should have the won the war in 1964 or 1968.”

Another question, “What was Reagan doing without congressional support by sending in the CIA to support dictatorships in South and Central America?” And quoting President Reagan, “We can’t have communism south of the U.S. border.”

The three protagonists play out their roles in taking different sides in the moral dilemmas presented as the story unfolds. The main protagonist is frozen in the middle: Is he a patriot or victim? Their stories and interactions with each other are told throughout the books with the emphasis on character development through dialogue, action and internal reflections.

Selectively chosen historical events to elucidate the divisive U.S. foreign policy decisions made over the two decades are identified in the books.

EB: What was the research process like?

DO: I was in love with the research process for the two books. An abundance of resource material was on line for the divisive historical events taking place between 1964-1987. I have had a lifelong attraction to human dilemmas. During the above-stated time period, the United States, China and Russia defied the Non-Aggression Geneva Convention Accords of 1962 by fighting a secret war in Laos.

In South and Central America, was the Cold War worth the loss of life of ideologically left- leaning citizens who were redefined as revolutionaries, Marxists and Communists? Was buying arms from Iran paid for by unknown classified sources to support the Contras an attempt to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua? There were CIA-supported death squads in Nicaragua and Honduras targeted to neutralize so-called left leaning Marxists. Did the assassinations without a trial constitute human rights violations?

EB: What do you want readers to think about after reading Non-Official Cover Confessions?

DO: First, did the story work for the reader. Second, can the reader envision the two books adapted to screenplay formats for feature length movie production or a television series?

In the foreword of both books my last quote is my wish. “If there is a book you want to write,
write what should not be forgotten.” Isabel Allende.

EB: Non-Official Cover Confessions is the first of a series. Can you give us an idea of what is yet to come?

DO: Yes. The main protagonist pilots aircraft for secret missions throughout South America. He carries national security officials, regime officers, soldiers, mercenaries, prisoners and code-named CIA agents to and from what is called the Southern Cone that comprises five countries. With his paramilitary skills he then leads missions where he is part of the action. While in the war zones, many of the main protagonist’s actions become humanitarian efforts as his personal life becomes convoluted with loyalties, friendships and lovers.

The protagonist is later transferred to Central America to fly more missions into war zones. By this time, the code-named vertical command station has the protagonist leading death squads.

By 1983, the conflicted protagonist becomes a “hit man” in Lebanon to assassinate terrorists who are holding hostages for ransom. In the midst of all this action, a love story ebbs and flows beneath the radar.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.