Roger Loria remembers.
He recalls fleeing his home in Antwerp, Belgium, as a toddler with his mother, who carried a lone suitcase and a toothbrush. His recollection is vivid of joining another family to walk miles at night to reach the border with Switzerland.
Though just 3 1⁄2 years old, he was assigned the task of keeping their baby quiet by putting sugar cubes to his lips every time he made a sound.
They couldn’t let the Gestapo, the Nazi police, hear them.
Loria, 85, is a Holocaust survivor who will share his story at 7 p.m. on Thursday at the MacArthur Memorial Visitor Center in Norfolk. The program commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe during World War II is free, though registration is required.
“We had to crawl on our bellies toward the barbed wire because the Germans had made ditches so you would slip and break your neck,” Loria said, speaking on the phone from his Richmond home that he shares with his wife, Win. “I remember the Swiss soldier lifting the barbed wire to let us through.”
Loria and his mother, Dina, found safety unlike the 6 million Jews exterminated by the Nazis and their collaborators committed to ethnic cleansing. He learned after the war that his father, Wolf, had been killed.
As a native of Poland, Wolf Loria was classified as “stateless" after the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. While Roger and his mother had some protection given that they were born in Belgium, Wolf had none as an immigrant. He worried his stateless status would bring harm to his wife and child and left for France in 1942, hoping they could later follow. But he was captured and eventually deported to Auschwitz. Wolf died of starvation one month before the war ended.
Roger is the only survivor from his father’s side.
“More than 70 people were massacred from my father’s family,” Loria said. “To my knowledge, it’s the largest grave site of a single family during World War II.”
Many dug their own graves in the small Polish village. Others were shot.
“Some were buried alive,” said Loria, who learned the details as an adult from two men who had been small boys playing on a roof out of sight of the Nazis.
Loria feels fortunate to have photos of his father; not many survivors were able to hold on to keepsakes when they fled or were ordered to leave. A family friend who had warned his mother of a Nazi raid later went into the apartment and took the pictures.
“She could have been shot if they caught her. After the war, she gave us the pictures.”
Loria and his mother remained in Switzerland from January 1944 until the war ended in 1945. They returned to Belgium during the fall, but Dina was denied work because she was Jewish. They were finally taken in by a Jewish orphanage. Dina watched the girls while Roger was left with the boys.
"I was told I could not communicate with her except during her days off," he said. "But I was lucky. I still had my mother."
Shortly after Israel's establishment as a sovereign state in 1948, the orphanage relocated there. After high school, Roger served 2 ½ years in the Israeli army as mandated by law. A cousin encouraged him to make a future in the diamond industry, his father’s livelihood. His mother stowed diamonds in the toothbrush they carried and paid off the smuggler who led them to the Swiss border.
But Loria chose another direction.
“I had the drive always to learn.”
Loria earned his undergraduate degree in Israel and attended the State of New York University at Buffalo on a Rockefeller Memorial Fellowship, awarded to a half-dozen students per year. He studied at Boston University under Sidney Kibrick, among the first physicians to administer the polio vaccine on the East Coast.
Loria retired as an internationally recognized expert in virology and immunology and an emeritus professor at Virginia Commonwealth University's Medical College.
When Loria lost his mother in 2004, he found his voice.
The Holocaust lessons of “never again” are continually challenged with a hatred and division that drives him to continue to speak out. It’s never easy.
“I’m careful how many times I do it,” he said. “I don’t want it to eat me alive.”
Attacks on churches, rising hostility toward minorities and antisemitism that has never gone away remind him that his message needs to be heard.
“People are not born hateful,” he said. “They learn it.”
The Norfolk talk will be his third speaking engagement this year. He and his youngest daughter, Rachel, are on the board of directors of Virginia’s Holocaust Museum. He has not visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
“That,” he said, “would be too much for me.”
Visit macarthurmemorial.org for more information and to register for the event.
