The Children

An Elizabethtown doctor finds a way to bring young victims back to life

Story and photos by Benjamin Pomerance

If you see Herbert Savel, he’s likely to tell you about the children. Their images line the walls of his office, fill the tables of his basement, consume every corner of his mind. He knows them, each and every one. All of them are dead. Most died at the hands of Nazis. So many lives exterminated before they ever had a chance to be lived. Savel remembers these children, remembers them even though he never met them, knowing them without knowing them. He’ll take you to see them if you ask. And he’ll tell you, as you stare into their eyes, just who these children are.    

Right now, they’re just blocks of wood. Slabs of linden, carved with the greatest precision into raised relief figures that memorialize human lives. Go back a few decades, though, and the carvings jump off the wood and come to life again, normal children with normal lives. “These are real people,” Savel says, repeating it like a mantra. “These are real people. They lived.” Lived and laughed and loved. Then came the Holocaust.    

"Everything has to be perfect"

The children are born in Savel’s basement. Not made or carved or created, but born. Re-born, to be specific. Savel carves them with confident strokes, his endless array of the best chisels you can buy bringing the dead back to life. He carves fast. One day for the simplest carvings; three at most, usually, for those with several people and intricate detail. He also carves well. “Everything has to be perfect,” Savel states. “That’s my rule.” When the carving is done, he paints the figures with the finest paint around — $45 per tube. “I get the best,” he says simply. He gestures to the carvings. “Don’t these kids deserve it?”  

Proof of reality comes from photographs. That’s the key to the whole operation: the photographs. Every day since April 1, 2002, Savel has taped a Holocaust photograph to his workbench and either started or continued re-creating it through his carvings. He calls the effort “Kaddish In Wood.” Kaddish — the Hebrew prayer for the dead. The carvings, though, are more than a prayer. They’re a remembrance, a remembrance of childrens’ lives truncated too soon to be known to the world. Most of their photographs come from Serge Klarsfeld’s monumental research work “French Children of the Holocaust,” a compilation of thousands of black-and-white images, the last memories of youngsters fated for a collision course with tragedy. Someday, Savel will carve every picture in Klarsfeld’s book. No question, he says. By never taking a break — vacations, Savel insists, are out of the question — and retreating to his workshop every day of the week, he’ll finish with ease. “If I did one carving a day,” he muses, “I could do the entire Holocaust in 10,000 years.” He almost seems prepared to try.

When the children are ready, they are taken to their new home. Out of the basement, out the door, and around the corner to Court Street in Elizabethtown, where Savel has maintained an internal medicine practice for more than 30 years. The new children join the others on the office walls. There are over 700 carvings in here, and about 300 more at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, and still more on permanent display at SUNY Plattsburgh — 1,052 carvings in all, at least on this particular winter afternoon. The total number will change almost daily. Each carving will be displayed. Each child, under Savel’s strict watch, will be remembered.

"It was mesmerizing, just overwhelming. And a little frightening, even, to see all the energy that had been poured into the endeavor"

The stares of dead children can be a shock for the uninitiated. Douglas Skopp still remembers his first venture into Savel’s office a number of years ago. A longtime student of the Holocaust, the SUNY Plattsburgh Professor of History had accompanied a friend, Anne Holland, and her daughter on a trip to see the carvings for himself. Ultimately, the visit would lead to the establishment of a permanent display of Savel’s works at the college’s Feinberg Library. At first, though, Skopp wasn’t certain how to approach the carvings that blanket the doctor’s walls. “It was overwhelming,” Skopp recalls. “It seemed like every inch of available wall space was taken up with these carvings. You had the feeling that the room was filled with windows, with all those faces peering in at you. It was mesmerizing, just overwhelming. And a little frightening, even, to see all the energy that had been poured into the endeavor.”

The fear comes from death. Savel understands this fear, and addresses it freely and frequently. The point, he says, is not to memorialize a grotesque demise. The mission of his work is to honor young lives. Individual lives, lives that were far more than another cipher in the Nazi death counts. “People ask me how I can carve dead children,” Savel says. “I say, ‘There’s nothing wrong with these children. Their lives were beautiful. Their deaths were ugly, but their lives were beautiful. And we need to remember that.”

Savel remembers. He remembers aloud to visitors, taking them through the histories of a generation of youngsters. Addressing the carvings with reverence, he calls to them by name, his voice rising and falling as if the real children were there in the room. Here’s Henri Zylberberg, clutching his pint-sized violin. Here’s Stella Radomysler, walking hand-in-hand with her father. Here’s Miriam Neuberger, taking a stroll with Mother and Grandmother. Here are so many faces, so many eyes, so many of whom would come to know the horrors of starvation and gas chambers and mass graves. Here, though, the children are happy, excited, individual. They are alive.

Which is exactly what Savel wants. “What would the world have been like,” he asks, his voice almost at a whisper, “if these children had lived?” So every day, when his work at the office is done, the doctor goes into his basement and makes them live again. He reincarnates their vitality, preserves the happiness stolen from them by a regime of hatred. “My kid sister says ‘Herb — are you trying to bring them back to life?’” Savel says. “And I tell her ‘Yes — I am. Somebody needs to. This is what I am meant to do.”

Such remarks are not offhand from Savel. The doctor believes strongly in a power that his years of scientific study will never explain. Given the way this all began, how could he deny it? Walking into his landlord’s Elizabethtown home years ago, Savel discovered a museum-quality collection of woodcarvings adorning the walls. Turned out the landlord was a master carver from the legendary Oberammergau school in Germany. Savel, who had dabbled for years in abstract painting, was instantly intrigued. That day, he asked the man to teach him how to carve. “Why did I do that,” Savel demands, proving his point. “I never did anything with my hands like this. I was a nice Jewish boy — you know, study hard, get good marks. I grew up never using my hands.” Yet he began using them one week after making this inexplicable request, taking lessons from the German master along with his wife, Isabel. Instruction took place twice a week in three-hour sessions. Often, Savel says, the highlight of the evening was sweeping shavings from the carver’s floor. “At least that was something we could do right,” he comments wryly.

"There’s something spooky about this, something beyond my power to explain"

The classes went on for five years. The method, Savel says, was basic: the master carver would demonstrate a technique, then ask his pupils to duplicate it. The “apprentices” learned the essential tools and body positions of carving, discovered the challenges of “reading the grain” of a wooden block. Side-by-side, Herbert and Isabel Savel became carvers. They still have the first blocks of wood they chiseled, displayed on a shelf in the basement workshop. “My wife was much, much better than me,” Savel says. “When I carved with my teacher, I was lousy. But when I started to carve the Holocaust, it all got better. I can’t hardly make a mistake now.” He shakes his head. “There’s something spooky about this, something beyond my power to explain.”

What hasn’t changed since their earliest carving days is the fact that the doctor and his wife are still side-by-side. Isabel Savel has been married to her husband for over 50 years. For the last eight, she has lived a partner’s life with “Kaddish In Wood.” She helps her husband scrutinize the photographs, pointing out details and explaining features the doctor might miss. For many carvings, Isabel creates accessories — bits of clothing made from real cloth, eyeglasses with real glass and a thin wire frame. Occasionally, she’s even called upon to interpret the feminine hairstyles of the era. “We have our favorites, our favorite photographs,” she says, laughing. “And occasionally, we disagree.”

Isabel is a pianist. She speaks with ease of interpreting Schumann sonatas and the sparse orchestrations of Chopin’s concertos. In a small room one floor above the carving studio, a keyboard and piles of music reveal her greatest passion. Miniature photographs of the masters hang throughout the room — Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, even Richard Wagner, an ironic choice given Hitler’s fondness for Wagnerian operas. More than once during the interview, she dashes upstairs to her little conservatory, and the notes of lilting etudes fill the house. When her husband carves, though, Isabel spends most of her time with him, watching him from the couch that rests near his worktable. “Sometimes, when he’s carving, it’s like he’s in another world,” she says. “This is his mission. It’s something that I think would bring a lot of pleasure to these children and their families, to know that they are being remembered.”

The wood-carved memories are not for sale. How do you sell the children you’ve grown to love? Once, Savel gave a carving away, a gift for a Harvard professor whose brother, a Holocaust victim, was the subject of one of Savel’s works. At times, he’ll send them to interested museums for exhibitions, a process he says he welcomes because it means spreading his message to others. Mostly, though, Savel keeps them in his office, each one signed and dated and accompanied by a copy of the original black-and-white photograph. At times, he says, he’ll find himself speaking to them. All of them have made him cry at least once. Some bring tears to the eyes of others. “The (pharmaceutical company) reps will come to my office, and they’ll see the carvings on the walls,” Savel says, “and so many of them aren’t aware of what the Holocaust really meant. They’ll look at me and say, ‘They murdered innocent children?’ And I say, ‘Yes — they did. They murdered innocent children.’”

On this particular day, Savel is carving the Dresner family. Their expressions are happy, hopeful, unaware that one day they will be deported to a concentration camp and killed. The carvings, Savel reminds again, celebrate life instead of mourning death. Around their heads is a halo that will soon be painted cadmium-yellow, a representation of the aura of life each individual emits. Every person in every one of Savel’s carvings has a halo, the one thing they all have in common. Except Nazis. On the occasions when Nazis appear, no halos encircle their heads. Savel says this is because the Nazis rejected the fundamental concept of the oneness of humankind. Even here, a message, a detail that must be perfected.

The carving’s most important feature, though, is yet to come. Savel has yet to carve the eyes of the Dresner children. Once the eyes are carved, he explains, the carvings take on a new dimension. “They come to life,” Savel says, “and they speak to you, and they say ‘Hey! It’s about time you finished me!’”

So Savel finishes them. He’s devoted years to this work, and says he is prepared to give the rest of his life. As long as his eyes and hands remain healthy enough to allow it, he intends to carve. From his point of view, there is simply no other way to live. “There is an important message in this,” Savel says. “I want people to realize the Holocaust wasn’t six million people. It was one person, and then one person, and then another one person. And I want people to remember each person as an individual. I want them to treasure each life.”

Now, it’s time to bring back another life, to finish another carving for the wall, another memory. The discussion is over, the message — Never Forget! — passed to another recipient. The Dresner family is still clamped to the table, waiting to be finished, and Savel would like to complete them that night. After them will come another…and another…and another. “I finish one,” Savel says, “and I hear the voices of the other children saying ‘Me next! Me next! Do me next!’” He turns to go. The children are waiting. He won’t let them down.

Have you ever seen Herbert Savel's carvings?