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Tonia Rotkopf Blair: Holocaust Survivor, Matriarch, Author
by The Blair Family

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Tonia Rotkopf Blair, Brazil, 1949. photo: unknown

After this general obituary, a short version of which is in The NY Times, Doniphan Blair provides a personal remembrance.

TONIA ROTKOPF BLAIR DIED ON
December 9th, 2021, at 96, at home and surrounded by love, after a life so varied it seemed like nine. Starting in another era and enduring the Holocaust, she traveled through Europe and South America before settling in New York City and becoming a beatnik, homemaker, administrative assistant, Columbia graduate and, finally, writer.

Indeed, her book, “Love at the End of the World: Stories of War, Romance and Redemption”, was published in 2021. She was also the subject of the 2007 documentary “Our Holocaust Vacation” made by her sons and shown on PBS. Both feature her unique perspective on kindness and relationships during the Holocaust.

Born in Lodz, Poland, to Mendel and Miriam-Gitla Rotkopf (nee Sonenberg), who were socialists and secular Jews, Tonia was raised in one room without plumbing or electricity, along with older sister Irena and younger brother Salek. Poor but not deprived, they attended the progressive Yiddish Medem Schul.

After the German invasion, Tonia became the youngest nurse in the Lodz ghetto’s Lagenitska Hospital, which saved her from deportation with her family. They were all killed in 1942, in Mzsana Dolna, southern Poland. Despite this tragedy and the world war raging around her, she remained a teenage woman, who fell in love and learned about romance.

After the ghetto was liquidated in August 1944, she was shipped to Auschwitz and survived three weeks there. She was then sent to work in an airplane factory in Freiburg, Germany, where she was reunited with her best friend and fellow nurse, Bluma Strauch. Liberated from Mauthausen camp, Austria, by the Americans, they crossed to the Soviet side.

Returning to Lodz and finding no Jews but plenty of anti-Semitism, they hitchhiked back to the West and got nursing jobs in a refugee hospital in Landsberg am Lech, Germany, for almost two years. After moving to Paris, they travelled to La Paz, Bolivia, where Bluma had brothers. Continuing solo, Tonia lived with a wealthy cousin in Rio de Janeiro, right on Copacabana beach, another one of her varied lives. She finally arrived in Manhattan in 1950, where she felt right at home and started school, studying art, and working as a secretary.

Tonia at age 3 (far right), with her mother Miram, sister Irena and four Plonski cousins, 1928, Lodz, Poland. photo: professional

As an au pair for filmmaker Sidney Meyers, she met Vachel Blair, a cinematographer, veteran of the Spanish Civil War and WW II, and a gentile. They shared interests in multiculturalism, art and social justice.

After marrying and having two sons, they moved to Morningside Gardens, an experimental, integrated housing project near Columbia University. Tonia became an administrative assistant at the Interchurch Center and then Teachers College. She also went back to school, attending Columbia and graduating at 62 with a Sociology degree.

They bought a fixer-up country house and travelled extensively to visit their sons in California but also Brazil, Israel and Poland, where a 1980 journey awoke Tonia's ability to discuss the Holocaust. She also attended the second international gathering of Holocaust survivors, in Washington DC, in 1983, and joined a child survivor group, NAHOS.

After her husband died, in 1999, Tonia became part of a writers’ workshop taught by Susan Willerman and wrote some 40 stories longhand. Recognizing the strength of her style and insight into the female side of war, a son edited them and secured publication with Austin Macauley.

Tonia continued to travel until 2013, often to visit a son or granddaughter or attend a NAHOS gathering. After entering an assisted living facility in 2019, the pandemic inspired her family to bring her home. Taken care of principally by her granddaughter, she lived the last of her nine lives in comfort and community and passed peacefully, from complications due to Alzheimer’s.

She is survived by two sons and three grandchildren.

Tonia Rotkopf Blair, with her sons, Nicholas (lft) and Doniphan (rt), circa 1970. photo: Vachel Blair

Doniphan's Personal Remembrance

My mother, Tonia Rotkopf Blair, who resisted the Nazis with kindness, who travelled the world to find her people in New York, and who endured my teen years with permissiveness, died a month ago. Although she was 96, and we had the luxury of time and she the privilege of passing at home, her death is a gaping hole, freighted by the abyss of the Holocaust and the immensity of the love.

My mommy—our tribe’s great matriarch—is gone.

Sometimes depressed, she put a brave face on it, and I grew up feeling very cared for, adored, and safe. I thought this was standard mothering until I noticed deficiencies among some friends.

Since I had to break free early to start my own wandering, it took me decades to recognize her achievement, powered by a long tradition of humanism and romance, Jewish, Polish and female. Indeed, the atrocity that stained her, me, you, European history, was mitigated by her firm belief in humanity's general goodness.

I long knew she’d endured unworldly horror, including losing her family and surviving Auschwitz. Family lore has my younger brother and me racing into the living room, waiving wooden blocks with drawings of guns—we were forbidden toy guns—and yelling “We are going to kill a lot of Germans and run away.”

But the Holocaust wasn't taught in school in the '60s and she didn't mention it much, so I knew no details except pleasant stories about making a friend or getting a meal.

Through those anecdotes, I learned she travelled a long, hard road after the war, including hitchhiking across Eastern Europe, living in a garret in Paris, sailing to South America and settling in Bolivia, all with her best friend and fellow nurse Bluma. After La Paz, Tonia lived with her second cousin Manashe Kryzepicki, who had become a banker in Rio de Janeiro, which generated many evocative tales of wealth, art and vacations in the jungle.

I didn't realize the half of it until I visited Rio and Manashe's wife Hilda, with whom Tonia became close, told she often went to the beach where she would be surrounded by young men. Then it dawned on me: My own mother was an attractive young woman on a great adventure. After a year there and another in Miami, she settled in New York City and became what I now see was a beatnik, given she took up drawing and guitar and attending art and film shows, especially after meeting my father, Vachel Blair.

Tonia and her husband Vachel Blair, circa 1954. photo: Vachel Blair

Although quite different—Jew-gentile, quiet-garrulous, immigrant-American—they shared interests in art, adventure and socialism, and adored each other. As a cinematographer, he sometimes worked out of town, including two months shooting a documentary in the South Seas, leaving her to parent two rambunctious boys.

My mother's quest, I eventually learned, was carrying through the darkness the light of familial and romantic love, typified by the Blake poem she liked to recite, which ends, “Remember that in former times love, sweet love, was called a crime.” She remained so innocent, one of my parents' friends, a real beatnik named Jay Bell, would ask her to leave the room when he told dirty jokes.

I got more glimpses of robust femaleness when we returned to Poland, in 1997, and shot the film "Our Holocaust Vacation" (see trailer). I saw how romantic and loving the Poles were, especially the women, who had to help their men endure life between two oppressive super powers. “I don’t know why I have such a weakness for Polish men,” Tonia said during that trip.

I finally realized the extent of her female power, however, when I edited her book, “Love at the End of the World”. Over a dozen stories, especially those from the middle of war to marrying my father in 1954, involve or feature men and romance, from distance and chaste to fireworks.

Tonia working as nurse holding her best friend Bluma Strauch's daughter Hanna, 1947,Landsberg am Lech, Germany. photo: unknown

In "The Good Germans" she recalls secretly flirting with a young German pilot. He brought her silk stocking, the most romantic gift of the day, although food would have been better. “Dr. Nabrinski" is about going on a date to the opera after the war. Another is titled, simply “Men Who Fell in Love with Me”.

The most striking story, however, is “Stefan” about being shipped out of the Lodz ghetto in a jammed cattle car and meeting a young man. They recited poetry and kissed until the train arrived at its unknown destination: Auschwitz. Given that was the first story she wrote for the writing class she joined in 1999, it seemed be an experience she wanted to highlight, or attempt to emblazon in literature.

Even in that horrific period, Tonia pursued the young woman’s sacred troth of studying and enacting romance. It was not a magical shield, but it nudged some people, including some Germans, toward respecting life.

It took me ten years to get Tonia to tell me about her first lover, who is mentioned but not named in her story “The Russians”. A Christian Pole about her age, also liberated from Mauthausen camp in Austria, Stanislav was quite the romantic. He wrote her poems, two of which she carried to New York, and caught a fawn in the forest for her to pet for her 20th birthday.

Tonia was also an adventurous aficionado of books, art and film, who would scour the NY Times for interesting work. Her dedication once brought my father, me and her to the Film Forum for the US premiere of “Will It Snow for Christmas?” (France, 1996). Afterward, my father and I teased her about its slow pacing and lack of professionalism, until it dawned on us: It was a masterpiece about female life, family and betrayal.

Tonia with a copy of 'Love at the End of the World', published by Austin Macauley in May 2021. photo:D. Blair

When it came to actual adventure, like when my brother and I starting hitchhiking around the North-East when we were 14 and 15, Tonia would worry—undoubtedly extensively—but we didn't know, because she put on that brave face. She didn’t want her issues to limit us. And she was a great adventurer on road trips with my father to Maine or Florida, or with me to the hinterlands of California or Mexico.

As Tonia got older, she assumed the role of a mature matriarch, enjoying her status, including the teasing she missed dishing out as a shy girl in a dark age. But that didn’t eclipse the young matriarchal magician, who uses romance, beauty and dreams, especially when I read her book to her.

Her last year and half was a spectacular blessing. My daughter Irena and brother Nick brought her home to her Manhattan apartment from an assisted living facility in New Jersey, where she was confined to her room due to Covid. Indeed, Irena had carefully set up fully professional care taking, replete with hospital bed, all the needed supplies and a comfort cat, Etsu. She even created a TikTok channel about her.

Her last months were like a second infancy. Along with my sister-in-law Tania and many dedicated friends and caretakers, we joined in feeding her, reading to her, playing her favorite songs or discussing favorite topics, like “Who wrote The Bible?” We would rejoice when she ate well or had a good day, not so bothered by the back pain from being wheelchair bound or the increasing mania of Alzheimer's.

It was a fantastic, final chapter to a long, intricate and loving life, one which had long outdistanced the Holocaust. "I don't think about it anymore," she told me.

Tonia salutes the photographer's (and your) health, circa 2017. photo: N. Blair

When it ended, on December 9th, 2021, Irena led us in a home vigil, including her Peruvian prayers and death doula techniques, our tradition of chanting "om" and the Jewish "sitting shiva." Finally, her physical body was taken to the lab, to which she had donated her brain for Alzheimer's research, and a few days later to be cremated, a family tradition started by my father. We accompanied it every step of the way.

Now, in my moments of loneliness or despair, I recall the power that carried her through the fires and fired her tenderness and love. It is enough to enable me, her, us, to carry on those noble dreams and flourish.

Thanks mom, Tonia, grandma, Tunia, cool chick, Tonuska.

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Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Jan 13, 2022 - 04:10 PM