| May. 17th, 2007 04:13 pm Class Today: We hand out missions We were dismissed from class today with a mandate: To live a good life.
Why? Because we had a speaker in our Holocaust class today. One who had this advice, more than any else, to issue to all the people he's talked to over the past ten years. I am sitting quietly in front of the computer with no other mission than to absorb everything I've heard in the past two hours, so I think I'll share it with you.
I love going to speakers and just listening but 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now I want to know what I heard and know how it affected me so at talks like these I try and take along some sort of notebook, jot down the basic facts, and what I heard that made the most impression on me. I want my children to know what I did during college besides class, work, and having a few friends; opportunities that were available, people that were on campus and why they were important, issues that were on my mind, etc. Leave a legacy and all that. So you get a slightly more organized and concise version of what my notebook got. Anyone who cares about what my school life is like will get a lovely and intense slice of it and I will have, somewhere in the vast schema of the universe, a rendering of the events that does not rely on my handwriting for posterity.
I hope I finish before the stiffness of the keyboard starts to upset me too much.
May 17th, 2007 Aaron Elster speaking to the last known iteration of the Holocaust class at North Central College, in Dr. David Frolick's final term at the school before he retires.
Memorable moments, written as he said them:
Why am I here talking about something that happened 60 years ago? I come to lay a burden on your shoulders. People like me are a disappearing phenomenon. Holocaust survivors are dying at the rate of 15-20% each year. Soon, very soon, there will be none of us left.
On deniers: If you hate enough, you can take any lie and make it a truth. Hitler never conquered Germany. After the Holocaust, we said 'never again,' but it's become... just a saying.
If not me, then who? I come to lay a burden on your shoulders. I come so that you will not be bystanders.
11 million people, 6 million Jews, 1.5 of them children, including my 6 year old sister. I've accepted the death of every one else, parents, uncles, grandparents, neighbors, all of them. But not her. I ask you to think about 1 child. I ask you to focus, not on the statistic and numbers, but about a single child that is close to you, that you care about.
He grew up in a small town in Poland. When the Nazis came, first they lost their citizenship and were referred to as 'units' or 'pieces' instead of humans, than their transportation, then their radios and all forms of communication, and were then sent to the ghetto they were forced to build in a poor part of town. There 6,000 (the Jewish population of that village) were cramped in a place meant for 1,000 and everything was up to the whim of the omnipotent Germans. The chief rabbi was dragged from the temple, had his beard shorn in the marketplace, and was forced to dance so that the Gestapo could take pictures to send back home. Disease broke up in the close, soapless quarters. The dead were stripped naked and propped up against walls outside so that the Germans couldn't identify them because if they did, they would force the families to pay for burial. People summoned for work camps were sent to the extermination camp of Treblinka, 15 kilometers away. In the 2-3 years it operated, it killed 700,000 people. Food rations were 450 grams a day in the ghetto. You sit and here what the adults are saying about what is going to happen to us and you become an old man in your thinking. In 1942 he was ten years old. In September they started the final cleansings of the ghetto, the morning after the Day of Atonement, one of the High Holy days. The sun was shining brightly and his family was among the 40 people in a specially made hiding place. The Ukrainian guards found the door to their hiding spot, tore it off, and started randomly firing inside. They were beaten with wooden clubs and chased to the square where the sun was shining beautifully on that October morning. His sister Irene had been smuggled out of the ghetto into the home of a Polish woman before this but he and his other sister Sarah were still there. In the square, his parents sent him to escape. He crawled on his back through the people and then directly into the open sewers along the street. He did not believe he deserved such good fortune; other children were more obedient, more devout, more intelligent. He hid with his aunt and cousin in another building, but they refused to leave even after he told them another sweep was coming through to catch anyone who had found shelter. He found other escapees at a former labor camp and discovered his mother had been left behind as part of a detail to pack all Jewish belongings to be shipped to Germany. And... I'm not sure I can finish this right now. After much running and hiding, he ended up in the attic of the family that had taken in his sister where he was humiliated, mistreated, and verbally abused but kept alive until the Russians liberated their village. His dad was killed in the gas chambers, his mother was discovered after escaping and shot months before liberation, and absolutely no one knows what happened to his little sister Sarah. He wrote a book with Joy Erlichmann Miller, who is one of the essayists in our Holocaust book by Niewyk, and named it "I Still See Her Haunting Eyes: The Holocaust & a Hidden Child Named Aaron" after his sister. It's a good book, much more vivid and detailed even than what he told us, as he only had two hours. And I'd recommend it because I just can't finish telling the story right now. I'm sorry. Current Location: library
Current Mood:  morose
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