This morning, I was invited by one of my former professors to attend a lecture at an area high school where he also teaches. The lecture was being given by a Holocaust survivor. This man, who lives in NB and is retired from working here in NB, described his experience during WWII in Poland. I am sure these were very painful recollections of his life during that time but I honestly believe there is no better way to teach others about something like this than through those who have lived it. I was gracious for the opportunity to attend and listen to this man speak.
The speaker was born in the city of Tarnow, Poland (pronounced “Tarnoff”) in 1938, just one year before my own father was born. He explained that the city was about the size of Fredericton, with about 55,000 people living there. After hearing him tell the date he was born, I couldn’t help but think of the contrast between the childhood he’d had compared to that of my father’s.
He recounted the memory of his grandfather being kicked down the stairs and shot in front of him by Nazis, and how, at the age of five, he had to go for 2 years into a hole in the wall behind a false wall above a flour mill his father had previously been part owner of with eight other people. His story is reminiscent of Anne Frank’s, only he and his family had a better outcome than most of the Frank family. He talked about their experiences in the attic and remembers the one overwhelming thing was the constant, unabating fear they all existed under. He described the joy they felt seeing the Russian soldiers come to liberate them, then coming to the realization that he had lost the ability to walk down stairs during his two years in the attic. He stumbled down them, though, and kissed the boots of one of the soldiers who was there to liberate them.
He discussed family; he had many aunts and uncles before the war but afterward, only one maternal and one paternal uncle survived. He expressed how rare it was that his nuclear family was able to survive the war. One uncle of his actually survived a concentration camp, only to die because his body could not handle the food fed to him by the liberators; this was common among the concentration camp survivors.
One thing he discussed was the problem of perspective – he explained that, when Paul Bernardo killed Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, Canada was outraged because we were able to visualize and imagine those girls as our own. We were capable of putting it into perspective. But 6 000 000? How does one reconcile that large of a number of people murdered?
He explained the ways he puts the numbers into perspective – he read off three names of children, which took him 15 seconds. He figured it out that it would take him 290 days to read all the names of the children who died if he read them every day for 8 hours straight. Those three children’s names were three of the 26 who underwent medical experiments by the Nazis during the war. When the end of the war was drawing near, to cover up the evidence of what they’d been doing, they hung those children on hooks but their weight was not enough to hang them so the guards had to yank their legs to finish the job. He told us that where he was from, there were about 8000 children before the war. He showed us a photo of a monument built after the war near a mass grave with about fifteen children standing in front of it (he and his brother included). These were all that remained after the war of the 8000.
The speaker fielded many questions from the students from things like, “How did you get your food in the attic?” to questions that will never be properly answered about why the rest of the world turned its back during the Holocaust to what was going on, asked by a bright young girl who had sat near the front of the theater during the talk.
He also spoke about why it is important for us to teach about the Holocaust – about the questions asked when the Holocaust Memorial was being built in Washington about why it needed to be built there, when the Holocaust didn’t happen there and about how the other many museums in Washington celebrate human achievement and this would be a museum about the some of the worst human depravity that has ever occurred in history. He spoke about the fact that we must learn from this, that the six million people who died would have at least wanted to know that the world learned something from their fate. He also spoke about the importance of educating the future generations so that this would never happen again so that people would never again be indifferent as they were when this atrocity was going on.
On the drive home after the lecture, I passed a long funeral procession on the highway. It’s interesting to me that when one begins to really stop and think about something or study it deeply, it begins to affect your whole perspective – would I have driven by that procession a few months ago and thought of the families of six million people who never had the opportunity to properly grieve or bury their loved ones? of the millions of people whose families don’t have a place to go and think about or remember their loved ones, other than maybe perhaps a large mass grave marking a spot where so many were murdered? It’s not likely I would have. Right now, I am so immersed in learning and reading about this, that I cannot help but have these thoughts; I realize this may wane over time but I know I’ll never forget what I am learning as I prepare for this trip.
