Last month saw the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and with it, numerous articles about Holocaust survivors who had gathered at the death camp to share painful memories, and to admonish those who cry “Never Again!” to mean it. Most of the 200 survivors present were in their nineties, frail and infirm, but determined to bear witness.
Ninety-two year-old David Lenga was one of them. He survived Auschwitz and was liberated in 1945. One of only two family members to survive, he remembered where terrible things happened. “Everything left a deep scar on my soul,” he said. “I remember the inside of the barracks, smoke from the chimney, the place next to the wall where the shootings happened. I will never forget it.”
Lenga worries that the apathy people exhibited then is being repeated, “especially with this rise in hatred in different places. The hatred is like a deadly virus. We cannot allow it to creep into our tomorrow,” he told the Jerusalem Post.
At 95, Erna de Vries, another survivor who remembers how hungry she was when she sees a piece of bread, shares his fear of reprise. She speaks to German school children and university students about the camps, inspired by the memory of her mother. “Survive and tell everyone what they did to us,” she said before dying.
The concern that motivates David Lenga, Erna de Vries and others to tell their stories is understandable. There are very few survivors left, and who will tell their stories when they are gone, they worry.
It’s an important question given a recent report in The Guardian, which revealed, among other startling facts, that fewer than half of American adults know how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust and almost 69 percent of Americans thought the Holocaust happened sometime between 1930 and 1950.
Coupled with ignorance about the Holocaust and Holocaust deniers, the rise in anti-Semitism has become extremely troubling. According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in the U.S. in 2018 were the third-highest total since the civil rights group began publishing data 40 years ago. A forthcoming report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University says antisemitic hate crimes in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago – the three largest cities in the US – are poised now to hit an 18-year peak. And anti-Semitism is already evident in geo-politics and among conservative leaders, including those in the White House.
That’s why Jewish organizations have been urging parliamentarians everywhere to toughen anti-Semitism laws and to promote Holocaust education. As Piotr Cywinkski, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, told The New York Times, “We are becoming more and more indifferent, introverted, apathetic, and passive. Most were silent as the Syrians were drowning, we silently turned our backs on the Congolese and Rohingya people, and now the Uighurs. Our silence is our severe defeat.”
I was among the lucky ones. My extended family, persecuted out of Ukraine, emigrated to the U.S. early in the 20th century. Born during WWII, I would likely have perished if they had remained in Europe. But like all Jewish people, the history of the Holocaust is in my blood. I felt it when, as a young woman, I gazed at picture postcards on the wall in Anne Frank’s attic bedroom. I felt it again when I wept at Yad Vashem at the sight of an enormous pile of children’s shoes. I feel it every time I read Holocaust literature and know that I could easily have been one of the characters. I felt it when I visited a Nazi work camp in Latvia not long ago and saw a photograph of children, many of whom would die of illness and starvation while their parents were worked to death. I feel it just thinking about whether I could cope with a visit to Auschwitz.
Once I wrote a poem about whether I’d have had the skill and guts to survive the Holocaust. Here is an excerpt:
March 13, 1943 flashes across the screen as "Schindler's Juden"
are choked out of the Kracow Ghetto. I feel my own breath
trapped in my chest as if I too were racing for a cellar,
a closet, a bedspring, anywhere they cannot find me.
A month later, it will happen again in Warsaw. And again.
the black saber of the Holocaust will disembowel European Jewry.
I read Anne Frank's diary when I was thirteen, and imagined myself,
budding writer, adolescent, believer in the human spirit,
in the attic gazing dreamily at the sky. Would I have had
the courage, the cunning, the chutzpah, to survive?
Would I have lived in trees, eaten garbage, kept silent,
as Nazis thrust their filthy hands up my skirt?
I was born a Jew, one week after 3,000 people like me
perished in Kracow. I began to live one month before
Jewish lives ended in Warsaw, and but for an ocean,
I might have been among them. And so,
the date on the screen, March 13, 1943,
traps the breath in my chest as if I too were racing for a cellar,
a closet, a bedspring, anywhere they cannot find me.
*
Never again. Never. Again.