Memory And Education: We Must Never Forget

It has now been over two months since we returned from Poland but it seems like only yesterday we were walking through the gates of Auschwitz I. Describing my experience at the death camps has not been easy but I have done my best to put it into words because it is essential, now more than ever, to educate others on the matter. A recent survey, as reported by The New York Times, found there are critical gaps both in awareness of basic facts as well as thorough knowledge of the Holocaust among a majority of Americans. This lack of knowledge is more pronounced among millennials, whom the survey defined as people ages 18 to 34, the future of this country. As reported by The Times: “Thirty-one percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millennials, believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust; the actual number is around six million. Forty-one percent of Americans, and 66 percent of millennials, cannot say what Auschwitz was. And 52 percent of Americans wrongly think Hitler came to power through force.” This is unacceptable in one of the most educated nations in the world but not necessarily surprising. With each passing decade, events such as the Holocaust can be forgotten and dismissed as mistakes of the past. The only mistake to be made, however, is the mistake of allowing people to forget one of the darkest times in human history.

Keeping the memory of the Shoah alive is vital to our future, for "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Hearing the testimonies of those who survived the Shoah is one way to keep the memory alive, although this is becoming a difficult task as time goes by and survivors eventually pass away. That is why it is important as an educator to pass this information along to the next generation of scholars. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to hear the stories of several survivors of the Holocaust since January, including the survivor we met with at the JCC in Kraków. I was able to record most of these testimonies and plan on one day transcribing these memories so that they can be both heard and read. These firsthand accounts give you a small glimpse into a bloody period in history where men, women, and children were slaughtered by the millions.

Education about the Holocaust is also of the utmost importance, especially considering the results of the survey reported by The New York Times. While in Poland we attended two classes at Auschwitz I, as well as lectures at the Centre for Dialogue and Prayer in Oświęcim (where we stayed during our trip). One lecture we attended at Auschwitz that I found very interesting was taught by Teresa Wontor-Cichy and titled “Christian Clergy and Religious Life at Auschwitz”. Many do not realize that while the majority of people killed during the Holocaust were Jewish, Christians died as well. Such is the case with Saint Maximilian Kolbe, who offered to die in place of a stranger when that person was selected for death. After the lecture, Professor Wontor-Cichy showed us the area where Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to die, making me wonder if I could have done what he did had I been in his shoes. Effective Holocaust education is a topic that will need to be addressed sooner than later and hopefully more people become aware of the facts. As a History major, I had decided to focus on U.S. history as my specialty but after visiting Poland and seeing those death camps, I have decided to focus on Holocaust history. My classmates and I were given an opportunity to experience something that not many people will have the chance to experience. It is our obligation to help keep the memory of the Shoah alive and educate those who are unaware of what occurred during the Holocaust so that it may never happen again. Remember: we must never forget.

Belongings plundered from the victims of Auschwitz by the SS, found after the liberation of the camp.

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From Judaism To Catholicism And Back Again

Friday morning, March 16, we traveled to Kraków to visit the Jewish Community Centre (JCC) of Kraków. It was there that we met Olga, who told us a little about herself and her Jewish ancestry. She also gave us information about the JCC itself, which is a Jewish cultural and educational centre that opened in 2008 as the result of an initiative by His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. The JCC is the de facto Jewish visitors center for Kraków, Poland and provides social, educational, and community oriented services to the Jewish community of Kraków. After hearing from Olga, we got a chance to meet with a Jewish woman who survived World War II and she was kind enough to share her story with us. Although she herself had not been confined to a concentration camp, her father did perish at Auschwitz. She and her mother were forced to move to a new town after being blackmailed twice and it was there that she was baptized as a Catholic to hide her Jewish roots. After the war ended she eventually converted back to Judaism and went on to further her education, studying law and becoming a professor. Today she is an active member of the JCC in Kraków and was present for Shabbat dinner Friday evening at the JCC, a dinner in which we were also in attendance for.

Throughout this semester I have heard the personal stories of a few survivors of the Shoah but this story was the first in which the survivor converted to Catholicism in order to survive. Prior to meeting the survivor at the JCC, I had only encountered such a situation in Alexander Donat’s The Holocaust Kingdom: the author and his wife had decided to smuggle their son Wlodek out of the ghetto and sent him to the home of Stefan and Maria Magenheim, friends of the family. Before doing so, however, Wlodek’s parents had to prepare him for life on the Aryan side where he could no longer be Jewish: “Lena had, in the interim, been teaching Wlodek the Catholic prayers. ‘Now remember’, she told him, ‘you have never lived in the Ghetto and you must never use the word Ghetto. You’re not a Jew. You’re a Polish Catholic...We were bitterly aware of the tragic spectacle of a mother teaching her only child to disavow his parents, his people, his former life…” (Donat, 114-115).

A few weeks after Wlodek’s arrival at the Magenheim home, they were betrayed by one of their neighbors. With the help of Magdalena Rusinek, a seventeen-year-old member of the Polish Underground who collected, cared for and escorted Jewish children to their places of refuge with Polish families or in convents, Wlodek was brought to an orphanage near Otwock, Poland, where he remained for two years. During that period, Maria would come to the orphanage whenever she could, bringing Wlodek cakes and other delicacies. Although Wlodek was safe by being away from his parents and denouncing his Jewish heritage, during his time away he was brainwashed by the nuns at the orphanage. In his own words, Wlodek explains in The Holocaust Kingdom that “Miss Krysia told me that Jews were very bad. They drank the blood of Catholics on their holidays. They kill a young boy or girl, suck out their blood and put it in jars…she said if Auntie Maria tried to take me back to my Mommy, I should run away to the woods. I prayed that my parents would not come back for me. I believed in Jesus very much.” (Donat, 302). To think that a nun would say these things to a child is unimaginable but it occurred and wasn’t uncommon.

Wlodek 's parents both survived the Shoah and were reunited with their son and although the reunion was rocky at first, with Wlodek’s mind full of anti-Semitic thoughts, he eventually returned to the religion of his family. Although Wlodek and the survivor we heard speak at the JCC had different stories, both accounts had one thing in common, which is the title of this blog: from Judaism to Catholicism and back again. This is what it took to survive the horrors of the Shoah but this approach did not always work. Luckily for Wlodek and the JCC survivor, however, it did and we were lucky enough to hear their stories.

Pictured here is the JCC survivor (green sweater) sitting next to Olga.

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The Execution Wall and the Majdanek Massacre

On March 15th, we returned to Auschwitz I to attend a workshop and explore more of the camp. I decided to revisit the execution wall between Blocks 10 and 11. Most of those executed here were Polish political prisoners, above all the leaders and members of clandestine organizations and people who helped escapees or facilitated contacts with the outside world. Prisoners of other nationalities and ethnic origins, including Jews and Soviet POWs, were also sometimes shot at this wall. The execution wall was dismantled in 1944 on the orders of the camp authorities. Executions were subsequently carried out elsewhere, most often in the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz II – Birkenau. After the war, the execution wall was partially reconstructed by the Museum.

Visiting this wall again reminded me of a scene in Alexander Donat's The Holocaust Kingdom, which can be found on pages 200 and 201 of the text. In this particular scene, an SS officer explains in detail the events of November 3rd, 1943 to the author, in which 18,000 Jews were killed in two days. Why? “Weapons were found hidden among the prisoners. They were going to mutiny!” (Donat, 200). Of course this was nothing more than an excuse and the Majdanek massacre’s true objective was the mass extermination of the Jews located at Majdanek concentration camp and all of its subcamps.

Prior to the massacre, prisoners were forced to dig three ditches that were two yards deep and about 1000 yards long. Male and female prisoners were then driven naked into separate ditches and forced to lie flat before being showered with bullets from automatic rifles. As Donat explains it, “the next groups were forced to lie down on top of the corpses of the previous ones" and “the killings went on for two days, from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m.” (Donat, 201). The killing of all those innocent people struck the author particularly hard, since he thought his wife was among the dead. This scene described in The Holocaust Kingdom may not have occurred at Auschwitz I, where the execution wall is located, but they are indeed connected to each other through a dark and sadistic twist: the irrational hatred of all the Jews of Europe. The murders at the execution wall in Auschwitz I and the scene described in Alexander Donat’s book could have and should have been prevented. It is one thing to read about mass murder in a memoir but when you are standing in a spot where so many innocent lives were wiped out, it brings a new understanding to the cruelty of mankind.

One thing I have learned from this trip is the importance of physicality, for physically being in an area where so many lives were destroyed or forever altered brings a whole new understanding of a situation. In this case, visiting Auschwitz I and seeing a site of mass murder helps me to truly grasp the words written by Alexander Donat in The Holocaust Kingdom.

The Execution Wall at Auschwitz I.

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