Jan Burzlaff is a historian of the Holocaust at Cornell University.

Lewiston, Maine, has been receiving people fleeing catastrophe for longer than most residents realize.

In the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale — one of the most important collections of Holocaust survivor testimony in the world — 14 interviews recorded in Auburn in the late 1980s and early 1990s tell part of that story. They have rarely been written about for a general
audience.

On the 81st anniversary of Liberation Day — May 8, 1945, the day the Second World War in Europe ended — they deserve to be heard here.

The story Americans often tell about immigration is a story of reinvention: the old world left behind, the new self assembled from scratch. For those Holocaust survivors who made their way to Lewiston and Portland, that story does not fit. They did not come to become someone else, but because there was nowhere else to go. What they needed was preservation — of memory, faith and the remnants of a world that had been deliberately destroyed.

Gerda Schild Haas was born in Ansbach, Germany, in 1922. During the war, she nursed the sick in Theresienstadt , a ghetto and transit camp in occupied Czechoslovakia where the Nazis held tens of thousands of Jews before deporting them to death camps farther east.

In February 1945, as the war was ending, a group of prisoners was transferred to Switzerland through a ransom deal with the SS. Gerda was among them, transported to safety while her mother was shot into a mass grave in Latvia. She pieced together what had happened to her mother only after the war — first from a newsreel in 1946. It took time, she said, to understand what she was seeing.

She settled in Lewiston, raised a family, and for years said almost nothing about what she had lived through. Instead, she focused on the work of building a life: showing up, working, parenting, practicing her faith. Then, at 49, she enrolled in college and went on to library school, eventually becoming a librarian.

She began writing down what had happened, which made her more open. In her own words, she worked to “bring Jewish life to the consciousness of the people” in Maine. When she sat down for her testimony in the late 1980s, she was still living with a question she could not answer: what had she done that made her different from all those who had been killed, and what was she now obligated to do with the life she had been given?

That question — the survivor’s burden, not the immigrant’s opportunity — is what distinguishes these testimonies from the standard story of the American Dream. The promise of a clean break, of starting over, was just not available to them. What they built in Maine was something more fragile and more deliberate: a continuation of what had nearly been destroyed.

In Portland, a cantor named Kurt Messerschmidt had sung Yiddish songs in a Nazi quarry, keeping fellow prisoners alive with his voice. After the war, he brought that same voice to Temple Beth El, where he served for 34 years. It was the same life, carried forward under radically different conditions.

He and his wife, Sonja, had found each other again on Yom Kippur 1945 in western Germany, exactly one year after they had last seen each other in Theresienstadt. They came to Portland together. When Sonja later explained why they had chosen the city, she said it reminded them of Bavaria, the cradle of the Nazi movement in southern Germany.

She did not elaborate, but the remark lingers. Perhaps it was the landscape: the forests, the scale, something familiar in the air. Or it was the possibility of living again within a recognizable world, this time without fear. Europe came with them, carried in memory, in habit, and in the quiet ways people choose where to begin again.

May 8 is marked loudly in Europe — ceremonies, speeches and heads of state. In the United States, it passes almost without notice. That quiet reflects something true about how many survivors rebuilt their lives right here: through the slow, private work of keeping something alive in places that had not asked for them.

Lewiston and Portland did not know they were becoming that kind of place. But they were, and they have been more than once. The Somali families who rebuilt their lives here after 2001 are part of that long history too, even if the connections are not always visible.

What these testimonies ask of us is recognition: that this landscape held people who had nowhere else to go; that the silence many survivors kept for decades was a form of strength; and that the continuity they preserved here — in a library, at a pulpit, one conversation at a time — became part of Maine’s story.

The Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine, founded by Gerda, brought survivors into a room and asked them to speak to their neighbors. That is its own kind of liberation.