Marking Humanity: Stories, Poems, & Essays by Holocaust Survivors - Shlomit Editor Kriger

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even daily basis. Most tell a story. Some are truly gripping. And even in the simplest of them, the stories they tell convey insight into the darkness that was experienced, as well as the world after the liberation.

      But Holocaust survivors have done more than bear witness. As you will notice throughout the biographies of the featured survivors, over the past two decades survivors have become teachers throughout the world, speaking with students in schools that are large and small, secular and religious, public and private, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and in a few cases—too few cases—Muslim. Many connect with the rich mosaic of students from diverse ethnic backgrounds: black and white, Asian and Hispanic, those from lands touched by the Holocaust, and those in the rest of world whose ancestors barely knew what was happening.

      Survivors have been surprised by the way in which they have been received in American classrooms, as well as in Europe and Israel. They speak of suffering and anguish, and students see in them symbols of resilience and even triumph. While they see themselves as defined by a past, youth are moved to discover that even after such a past, involving so massive a loss, one can look forward. No longer young, they are admired for their age. Representatives of the past who often trace their roots back to places that had barely entered the twentieth century, they are respected by those who grew up in the age of computers, digital music players, the Internet, and instant messaging—not because they are of the here and now, but because they lived then and there. The encounter is remarkable.

      Shlomit Kriger has compiled the writings of survivors from the United States, Canada, and abroad, survivors of the Holocaust from urban centres and rural communities. Even though their offerings are diverse and their experiences are different, they seemingly speak with one voice, of one experience.

      In the immediate post-war years, when the term “survivor” was used it meant only one thing: those who had been in concentration camps. Even then there was a hierarchy, because there was an absolute distinction between death camps and concentration camps. The former were places where Jews were systematically killed—gassed upon arrival. At three such camps, the Aktion Reinhard camps of Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, almost all—99 out of 100—were killed upon arrival; only a few were kept alive to perform basic tasks of the camp: sanitation, sorting of valuables, disposal of corpses, and service to the German masters. Though about 1.5 million Jews were killed in these death camps, there were fewer than 200 survivors. (That is not a misprint; perhaps it is an exaggeration of the number of those who survived. We know of two survivors of Belzec, perhaps 100 from Treblinka, and about 50 from Sobibor who were found alive after the war.)

      Auschwitz-Birkenau, which comprised three camps in one—a prison camp (Auschwitz I), a death camp (Auschwitz II or Birkenau), and a slave labour camp (Auschwitz III or Buna-Monowitz)—had many more victims as well as survivors. Some prisoners were kept alive to serve the Nazi industry that had invested heavily in slave labour and wanted to be its economic beneficiary. The Nazis presumed that a virtually limitless supply of slave labour would be theirs indefinitely.

      Those who were not in camps were not regarded as survivors then, much as American World War II veterans distinguished between those who served in theatres of combat and those who did not. Child survivors were not considered survivors then. Their parents often protected themselves from fully feeling what happened to their children by saying, “What could they remember? What could they understand?” And refugees, children who had escaped on the Kindertransport (Children’s Transport)—the children of Germany and Czechoslovakia who were fortunate enough to be sent to England and be received by the country just before the war began—were not considered survivors either. Neither were the Jews who survived the war in hiding by “passing” as “Aryans” or by being sequestered by others who often risked their lives and freedom to offer them shelter. Nor those Jews who in the days after the German invasion of Western Poland or following the German conquest of Soviet-occupied Poland in 1941 went counter to the Jewish experience of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and fled east to the Soviet Union. Many were sent to Siberia, where they experienced hardships, cold, disease, famine, even death—but not systematic killing.

      That was then.

      However, given the passage of time, Marking Humanity: Stories, Poems, & Essays by Holocaust Survivors includes—as it should—the writings of all who are now considered survivors. It features those who were children and others who were adults, those who were in camps and who found refuge in England or the United States, some who escaped eastward, and others who lived in hiding. Their writings and memories are varied; yet, their urge to bear witness and their sense of themselves as survivors with a unique tale to tell are the same.

      One must welcome this testimony for its richness and diversity, for its inclusiveness and ingenuity. I have read prose far more than poetry and am far more confident in my assessment of an essay than a poem. Nevertheless, I find the contributors’ poetry moving. The insights expressed in a few words leave me wanting more, greater exposition and detail. Still, poetry has the ability to say much with brevity and to bring language to the edge of what can be said and what cannot be said.

      We who will all too soon live without that living memory of the past must be grateful for that breech of silence even as we are respectful of the unsaid.

       Michael Berenbaum

      Director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust

      American Jewish University

      Los Angeles, California

       Preface

      Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world.

      And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.

       —Talmud

      I wish there was no need to produce a book based on such a dark period in history. However, considering the continuing spread of antisemitism and other acts of discrimination and violence that occur around the world, I felt compelled to facilitate this anthology’s manifestation.

      Throughout this book, you will gain further insight into the fears, sorrows, triumphs, challenges, personal reflections, dreams, and growth that the Holocaust survivors and their relatives, friends, and neighbours experienced—amidst the chaos that ensued and as they went on to rebuild their lives after the liberation. These courageous individuals survived some of the worst atrocities known to mankind, and there is much to learn from them and their experiences. They serve as an example for others around the world still struggling to be heard and to reach a place of love, peace, and healing.

      These survivors could have easily allowed themselves to succumb to the ways of their oppressors,

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