John Menszer: Attorney, Photographer, Storyteller
By day John Menszer is a self-employed attorney helping his clients with complex bankruptcy issues. His manner is calm and rational as he sits in his downtown office and guides his clients toward the best solutions for their financial situations. By night, however, you may find John at The Moth, located in the Café Istanbul at the New Orleans Healing Center in the city’s Bywater district. On this particular night, when our Newman classmates are back in town for their 50th reunion, John has invited Robert Greenberg, his wife JoAnn, their adult children, and me to join him at The Moth. I take the St. Charles street car to my old neighborhood on Louisiana Avenue, where John picks me up and we drive to the Café Istanbul.
John with his dog Sophie on the front porch of his home in uptown New Orleans.
Outside John is friendly and self-assured and introduces me to his fellow storytellers. A family of fearless Tuxedo cats and kittens wander among people and cars. The Moth is a national group dedicated to storytelling, and John won The Moth citywide New Orleans competition last year. This year he has the honor of being a judge, and he smoothly arranges for a friend to judge with him at the next annual citywide Moth event, to be held the following week at the old Joy Theater on Canal Street. Inside we meet Robert and his family, and after hugs all around, we all sit on the front row facing the stage and wait to see if John will be one of the ten people who have put their names in a hat to be chosen to tell a story. The rules are simple. Each storyteller gets five minutes. No one can use notes, and the story must be true and based on life experience. Each participant has had a month to prepare a story following the announcement of that month’s theme.
John with Moth Host Eve Troeh and Assistant, Laine Kaplan-Levinson and Dana Bialek, New Orleans, LA, April 14, 2015.
We enjoy hearing the stories of the first five participants prior to the intermission, but we wonder if John will be selected. During intermission the bar to the side of the audience is busy. This unusual space, with a stage, rows of chairs, and a full bar, part of the New Orleans Healing Center, reminds me of growing up in New Orleans, where no one would find it strange to find a full bar located within a healing center.
As we reconvene for the second half of the program, we become increasingly anxious as the next participants are chosen and we don’t hear John’s name. Finally, toward the end of the evening, his name gets pulled from the hat, and he approaches the mike. He is anything but calm and rational. He is shaking, visibly tremulous, both excited and afraid, and he tells his personal story of wonder, that night’s storytelling theme. He doesn’t win tonight, and we all disagree with the judges’ decision. Meanwhile Robert’s son Eli and his wife Sharon have located a nearby restaurant in the Marigny district that will give us a dinner reservation for 10 pm. Not to worry, it’s New Orleans, and the six of us head off for an excellent meal.
John has been telling stories and documenting events for most of his life. During high school he was always there with his camera, and he has been photographing our class ever since. John describes photography as both a creative outlet and as “a way of preserving a past that I didn’t understand or that I was sort of suffering through, but it was a way of feeling, of connecting with my sense that I would endure and that I would come back to revisit these times, that I would understand them better.”
In early junior high school our classmate Joel Jacobs had an Ansco developing set, and John borrowed an old family camera, and he and Joel set about developing and printing photos. In 1965 John asked his father for a better camera, and his father ordered a single lens reflex Pentax for him. After college and graduate school in philosophy he got a job as a photographer’s assistant in Chicago and took courses at a place called the Darkroom. When he returned to New Orleans from Chicago in 1980, he installed a darkroom in his apartment. And when he went to Europe in 1985 he bought a Hasselblad camera.
John eventually felt that he was too focused on the technical aspects of photography to allow the creative side of his work to grow. Then in 1989 he started law school at Loyola University. He was working fulltime in his family’s real estate business and going to law school at night, and he decided to reward himself with a photography course each year. Around 1993 a course instructor named Eugene Richards challenged him to go beyond his considerable technical skills and to find a meaningful project. It was this challenge that led to John’s decision to photograph and interview Holocaust survivors in New Orleans. He obtained funding for the project from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities in 1993 and traveled with the project throughout the state of Louisiana and as far away as Virginia. The Holocaust Survivors Exhibit traveled to twenty locations and featured speaking events with Survivors. This article is from the Acadiana Newspaper of Abbeville, Louisiana, March 20, 1996.
When I interviewed John for this book in 1999, I was curious to learn what had led him to this project. When he asked if I wanted the full story, I responded with a definite yes. He began by saying, “Somehow as a kid, I heard my parents whispering and talking about the Holocaust. I mean, I had some sense of it.” He explained that as a young boy his family’s relatives by marriage, Minnie and her husband Nathan, lived across from John’s family. The couple had moved to New Orleans in 1950. Minnie had been in Auschwitz; she had a number on her arm and had had it removed. Despite John’s mother’s curiosity, Minnie would never talk about what she had experienced.
John was both curious and frightened, saying, “I had actual fear that this would be done to me.” He recalls going to Wise’s Cafeteria and having the fantasy that the people who were killed in the Holocaust had broken some trivial rule, like ordering the wrong thing at a restaurant or wearing the wrong color clothing. John decided as a young child that he was going to “be smart and not make those mistakes.” He also knew that people got killed because they were Jewish, and he reasoned that he should not tell anyone he was Jewish.
In the early 1960s he begged his parents to take him to see a movie about Hitler called Mein Kampf. He thought he was grown up and could handle the movie. At the end of the film was an image of “a shallow ditch with a lot of rotting corpses, and some of the bones were exposed and some of the flesh was all black.” John recalled, “It was just a horrible, horrible sight for a ten-year-old to see.” The next thing about the Holocaust that John remembers is that his mother acquired a book called Five Chimneys, a memoir written by Olga Lengyel, who was the only member of her Hungarian Jewish family to survive Auschwitz. He said that he was both frightened by the book and impressed by a story of how much the gift of a potato could mean to a person who was starving.
Later, when John was away at college at George Washington University, his mother, Elaine Menszer, became involved through a Brandeis University women’s group with a project to interview Holocaust survivors. He remembers her coming back from the interviews and talking about how moved she was and “how incredible the stories were.” After starting his photography and interview project, John succeeded in obtaining some of the taped recordings of his mother’s interviews, which had been sitting in the Brandeis University Library for years, enabling him to compare his mother’s interviews with the ones he did many years later.
When John was challenged by his photography instructor to use his skills in a creative and meaningful way, he initially felt “stymied.” He explained further:
"I thought back to that dictum about you do best what you love.
And the idea of Holocaust survivors came out of nowhere.
I can’t say where it came from. It came into my mind and
I thought about what my mother did. And of course I remembered
the sense of emotional power that the subject matter has for me,
with, you know, my own personal tragedy about my brother’s
suicide—I just thought that—and my mother has always been one
who is very connected with the tragic. She’s always connected with
that emotionally, and I am too, and I think it made sense to me that
I would be able to connect with these people in a feeling way.”
His parents suggested that he start his Holocaust project by talking with Shep Zitler, one of the founders of the New American Social Club, the local Holocaust survivors’ organization. So John went to Shep’s home in the Lakeview section of New Orleans and began hearing his story. At their first meeting Shep showed John a tiny photograph of himself with his family in Poland in 1936, most of whom were later brutally murdered. John had the idea of photographing Shep with the picture, thereby reuniting Shep with his family. After multiple technical failures, the concept did not work at all, according to John. He said, ”And I couldn’t believe it, but after putting him through this—you know, “stand here” and “don’t move” and “wait” and taking over his house—he invited me back, like I was an old friend, and he treasured the time to be together.” Shep invited John back to his home and John began to interview him at great length. Shep had survived the war as a prisoner for almost six years in a prisoner-of-war camp with other soldiers, mostly gentiles. If you click on this link, you can hear Shep singing "The Partisan Song" in Yiddish, and you can read the translation into English. The song was written by partisan Hirsh Glick, who, like Shep, was from Vilna.
Click here to listen to Shep singing"The Partisan Song."
Transcript: Zog nit keyn mol az du geyst dem letsten veg,
Khotsh himlen blayene farsthtelen bloye teg.
[Never say you are walking your final road,
Though leaden skies conceal the days of blue.]
Kumen vet nokh undzer oysgebenkte sha’ah,
S’vet a poyk ton undzer trot mir zaynen do!
[The hour that we have longed for will appear,
Our steps will beat out like drums: We are here!]
Fun grinem palmenland biz vaysen land fun shney,
Mir kumen on mit undzer payn, mit undzer vey.
[From the green lands of palm trees to lands white with snow,
We are coming with our all pain and all our woe.]
Un vu gefalen s’iz a shpritz fun undzer blut,
Shprotzen vet dort undzer gevurah, undzer mut.
[Wherever a spurt of our blood has fallen to the ground,
There our might and our courage will sprout again.]
S’vet di morgenzum bagilden undz dem haynt,
Un der nekhten vet farshvinden miten faynd.
[The morning sun will shine on us one day,
Our enemy will vanish and fade away.]
Nor oyb farzamen vet di zun in dem kayor,
Vi a parol zol geyn dos lid fun dor tsu dor.
[But if the sun and dawn come too late for us,
From generation to generation let them be singing this song.]
Dos lid geshriben iz mit blut un nit mit blay,
S’iz nit keyn lidel fun a foygel oyf der fray,
[This song is written in blood not in pencil-lead.
It is not sung by the free-flying birds overhead,]
Dos hot a folk tsvishen falendike vent,
Dos lid gezungen mit naganes in di hent!
[But a people stood among collapsing walls,
And sang this song with pistols in their hands!]
Survivor Shep Zitler holding a photo of his family in Poland
The late Shep Zitler, on the right, age 19, with his family in Vilna, Poland, 1936, on the occasion of his sister, Rachel, standing just right of center in hat and overcoat, immigrating to Palestine. The remaining family pictured here died in the Holocaust. Shep's oldest brother Benjamin was already in Palestine.
The process of interviewing was emotionally exhausting for John. There were multiple technical problems, but John persevered, eventually obtaining funding. He said, “Word got around that the interviews were being done, and I guess, that I was respectful. You know, supportive.” John went on to interview and photograph other local survivors, including Eva Galler, Solomon Radasky, Isak Borenstein, Joseph Sher, and Jeannine Burk.
John with Jeannine Burk at the Jewish Community Center in New Orleans on Yom HaShoah in 2019. They are standing together in front of his original portrait of her. Sadly, she has since passed away.
At the opening night of the exhibit at the Jewish Community Center in New Orleans, the event was covered by all three local TV networks. Addressing the audience, John spoke from the heart, “from my core out—it was purely me, it was purely emotional, and I was like so proud, so moved. I felt like, this is my life’s purpose, this is my life’s work. And the important thing to me was to connect with the survivors, to give them the recognition for what they had experienced, that they had never gotten in their lifetime, to that time. I mean, I felt like I was caring for them. . . . I felt like I was the bridge between them and the world. And at the end we all sang, Zag Nit Keynmol, the survivor anthem.”
John in his darkroom in the pre-digital era.
I was curious about how these particular survivors got to New Orleans, and John explained to me that they were mostly Polish survivors who had distant relatives in New Orleans, like Minnie and Nathan. New Orleans, along with Boston and New York, had been designated in the 1948 Displaced Persons Act as one of the disembarkation ports for refugees coming from Europe.
John’s parents met during World War II in Washington, DC. His mother Elaine was born in Rosedale, Mississippi, and her family moved to Washington, where she worked for the US Department of the Interior. His father Sam, who grew up in Gretna, outside of New Orleans, attended Louisiana State University to become an electrical engineer. During the war he originally had a vital deferment while working for Westinghouse and then was deployed to a Naval facility near Washington, where he met Elaine. They married and after the war moved to New Orleans, where Sam joined the family business and the couple started a family. John was born in 1949, and two more sons followed. Elaine was a talented artist and sculptor, although she was not exhibited in her lifetime. In addition to interviewing New Orleans Holocaust survivors in the late 1960s, Elaine did a series of small Holocaust sculptures, which can be described as both powerful and chilling.
Sam Menszer, Kenny, Gary, John, and Elaine Menszer, Mardi Gras Roosevelt Hotel, 1955.
I asked John for any thoughts or feelings about our class at Newman in relation to the Holocaust. I didn’t recall that the Holocaust was a subject of discussion or instruction. He answered that our parents’ generation did not want to hear about the experiences of the survivors when they arrived in the U.S. His observation is that the Holocaust went in and out of consciousness for many people after World War II. Also, he explained, “our parents were very conscious of the importance of assimilation in America.” I asked him if the Holocaust was talked about at Newman, and he said he couldn’t speak for other people because of his social isolation. He recalled our political science teacher, Mr. Frank Cernicek , who came from Czechoslovakia, talking about his brother being in a concentration camp as a result of Partisan activities, but he doesn’t remember any discussion of the Holocaust, in terms of Jews, in any History or English courses.
I was also interested in John’s experience of exclusion at Newman. I told him that I very much remember feeling like an outsider, arriving as a new student at the start of the senior year of high school. John said that he felt so excluded at Newman. The night before starting Newman in the seventh grade he had insomnia and was fearful. He said that he never felt included, from the very beginning. “Newman was like a headache I had to endure.” During our senior year John finally “started feeling less like an outsider.” He could see some freedom coming, and he remembers purchasing a helpful book that I suggested. By the end of the year he felt like he belonged to something, to some group, and some of us were marching together in front of the Customs House protesting the draft.
After travelling with the portraits and stories, John created an extensive website: www.holocaustsurvivors.org. The website portrays the photographs and survival stories of the people that he interviewed, as well as live voice excerpts from the interviews. Currently John is having the audio recordings digitized, and his material will be donated to research libraries to be available for future generations of scholars. The website has been recently updated for multiple platforms, with enhanced features and security. John wrote in a recent press release:
Each of the six survivor stories is a gateway to history. The stories begin with their lives pre-WWII, cover the Holocaust period in detail and continue with their postwar success as immigrants. The stories are based on in-depth interviews conducted over years. Each is written as first-person text, with audio clips, photographs, and historical documents keyed to the stories and just a mouse click away. Special features include an introduction to the Holocaust and the exhibit -- Voices From the Oblivion -- a series of postcards sent from a Polish family to their son in a Stalag Military prison. The son was the only member of his family to survive.
In 1999 John and his parents traveled to Poland, partly to search for any living relatives. They hired a driver and a translator for the trip. They visited the apartment complex in Czestochowa where survivor Joseph Sher had lived, and John took photographs. They went to Auschwitz, where they met with the museum director and were given a special tour because of John’s work. The family then went to Bochnia, a town in Galicia near Crakow, where John’s grandmother’s family was from. John spent several hours looking through family records, and they went to visit the family home. The family home is no longer there, but they were warmly received by the neighbors. Afterward they visited the cemetery where John’s father’s grandfather, who died in the 30s before the Holocaust, is buried. Whereas most Jewish cemeteries in Poland had been destroyed, this cemetery was preserved and restored by an Israeli. They were pressed for time so John decided just to wander around, and he found the gravesite of his great-grandfather, Isaac Rottersman. The largest letters on the gravestone say "Isaac Rottersman, son of Smuel." John's father was named Samuel after his great-grandfather Smuel.
Translation of Hebrew:
Isaac Rottersman, son of Smuel
Sam Menszer at the grave of his grandfather, Isaac Rottersman, Bochnia, Poland, 1999.
After his mother died in 2010, John and his father took a second trip, this time to Romania, searching for Hungarian-speaking relatives of his paternal grandfather. They visited the town of Simand near Arad. They found gravestones of Menczers, the former spelling of Menszer, and they met a man with the surname Menczer. They attended Friday night services in a small synagogue in Arad. It was a small, informal service without a rabbi, followed by a Shabbat dinner with the congregation. John felt a strong spiritual connection both to the place and the people.
Friday Shabbat Kiddush, Arad, Romania, 2011.
As he had hoped, John Menszer effectively served as a bridge between the New Orleans community of Holocaust survivors and the rest of the world. His creative work, which began as a challenge from a photography instructor, memorialized the experiences of local Holocaust survivors. Like descendants of Holocaust survivors, both he and his mother Elaine deeply connected with memories that were not their own and communicated their sense of the tragic through portraits, stories, and sculpture. John’s work is part of worldwide efforts of Holocaust survivors, descendants, and scholars to ensure that the Holocaust is not forgotten. He can be honored with the term “Holocaust carrier” in his use of his storytelling and visual documentation to bring Holocaust trauma to the wider society. John continues to feel, as he did when we first spoke about his project in 1999, that this work is his life purpose and his life’s work.