Life beyond Holocaust for survivor

Isaac Levendel is a Holocaust survivor, but he doesn't want that to define who he is.

“One of the things that bothers me with this topic is that people who listen to it, they assume that we're carrying that on our shoulder with us,” Levendel, 73, said by telephone from his Chicago home. “They think our face tells the story.”

“We are not that,” he said. “We went through that, but we also went through life.”

Levendel will be in Cedar Rapids and Mount Vernon next week, speaking to audiences about his experiences as a young child growing up in a small French village. While his father, Meijlech Schops, spent the majority of World War II as a forgotten prisoner in Switzerland, Levendel's mother, Sarah Goldstein, was taken to the Drancy detainment camp outside Paris and then to Auschwitz. Because she was ill, she was sent directly to the gas chamber.

Levendel spent many years researching the Holocaust and what happened to his family, and he wrote the book, “Not the Germans Alone: A Son's Search for the Truth of Vichy” based on that research.

“I can trace things that are clearly related to what happened to me,” he said. “But this is more in the underlying characteristics. It dictates your choice of how you will live.”

“Life is much more than the Holocaust,” he said.

After his parents were taken during the war, Levendel was hidden by French farmers until his father's release in 1945. In 1947 he moved to Israel to study engineering and teach school. He later married his wife, Elsa, in Belgium and the couple had three children. In 1974 they moved to Los Angeles, where he earned a doctorate in computer science and engineering at the University of Southern California.

Levendel will be in Cedar Rapids and Mount Vernon from Sunday through April 13. He is scheduled to speak at Temple Judah in Cedar Rapids at 7 p.m. Sunday; in King Chapel at Cornell College in Mount Vernon at 11 a.m. Monday and in the Kesler Auditorium in Hickok Hall at Coe College in Cedar Rapids at 3:30 p.m. Monday; and in Room 234 of Cedar Hall at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids at 11 a.m. April 13 and in the Busse Center at the Chapel of Mercy at Mount Mercy College in Cedar Rapids at 7 p.m. April 13.