A true survivor

Amy R. Spurgeon

COSTA MESA--The thick, hardback book lists more than 100,000 Dutch Jews

murdered during the Holocaust. The names are listed alphabetically, along

with each person’s date of birth, death and the name of the concentration

camp where they died.

Holocaust survivor Marianne Trompetter Dazzo, a 65-year-old Fullerton

resident, solemnly points to the names of her paternal grandparents.

She reads the text aloud: “Trompetter, Isaac, 27-1-1882, Amsterdam, 28-5-1943, Sobibor. Trompetter-Gosler, Marianne, 8-6-1882, Amsterdam, 28-5-1943, Sobibor.”

“I found 105 relatives in here,” she said. “And I haven’t found all of

them yet.”

Dazzo is a volunteer at Costa Mesa-based Jewish Family Services of Orange

County, where she helps other Holocaust survivors in Orange County to

perform daily tasks.

She drives them to doctor appointments, takes them to the pharmacy and

helps them fill out paperwork necessary to obtain Jewish funds in Swiss

bank accounts. The funds belonged to Jews murdered during the Holocaust,

Dazzo said.

“It is a mitzvah to help them,” she said, using the Hebrew word for good

deed.

Dazzo also speaks to students across Orange County about the Holocaust.

She said while some younger students fall asleep during her presentation,

others embrace her affectionately afterward. She will join other Orange

County Holocaust survivors at a luncheon Wednesday in Costa Mesa.

A retired elementary school teacher, Dazzo is focused on making the most

of life through education, public outreach, volunteerism and socializing.

Married for 45 years with three grown children, she is enjoying life. But

her existence was not always a happy one.

Dazzo, a petite woman with brown hair and a flair for fashion, openly

shared the details of her horrific past while nervously twisting a blue

Equal packet and sipping black coffee from a clear, glass mug at her

kitchen table.

Dazzo’s paternal grandparents, Isaac and Marianne (whom she is named

after), died the day they arrived at the Sobibor death camp in Poland.

Nazis ordered her 30-year-old father, Morris, to the Auschwitz death camp

when she was only 7.

She, her mother, Femma, and younger sister, Sylvia, packed a suitcase and

waited for the day the Nazis came to take them away from their small,

two-bedroom, first-floor apartment. The call came in the middle of a hot

summer night in 1942.

“We heard the boots. The screaming and the yelling,” said Dazzo, who

remembered having to leave her books behind. “They loaded my neighborhood

into trucks with wooden seats.”

Scared to death, Dazzo sat quietly in the dark.

“They were big men,” she said. “And everyone was quiet or else they would

hit you.”

Dazzo came down with scarlet fever that night and was taken to the

hospital. There, someone approached her mother to see if the three wanted

to go into hiding. Split up immediately, they would not reunite for three

years.

When the war ended in 1945, Dazzo found her immediate family, thanks to

American Red Cross lists providing the names of survivors and their

whereabouts throughout Europe. The foursome immigrated to New York in

1949, eager to start over.

But nightmares and extreme depression haunted her parents, who never

recovered from the war. Dazzo’s mother, who lost her entire family, went

into mourning. And eventually Dazzo’s father committed suicide.

“He was a very angry man,” Dazzo said. “He took it out on us.”

Dazzo said the years following the war were like living with strangers.

She said her family life was dysfunctional, but she refused to give up.

“I got my [Jewish] identity back,” she said. “I got educated. I met my

husband. I have a great life.”But Dazzo said what happened during the

Holocaust still evokes anger and hate inside of her.

“You can make a good life for yourself but it never goes away,” she said.

“We all carry our scars. Some manage better than others.”

FYI

A Holocaust survivors luncheon will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Wednesday in Chisik Auditorium at Jewish Family Services of Orange

County, 250 E. Baker St., Costa Mesa. Admission is free. For more

information, call (714) 445-4950.