Telling her first-hand account of the Holocaust is essential to keep the genocide prominent in people’s minds, Holocaust survivor Margot Schlesinger said Thursday to a crowd of 80 students at the Fiedler Hillel Center.
“To be silent is to consent,” she said. “I will never let anyone forget and I’m doing it until I die.”
Schlesinger’s speech was part of a set of events held to celebrate Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Jews from the Nazi concentration camps.
The events were co-sponsored by the Fiedler Hillel Center, Tannenbaum Chabad House and Students Helping Organize Awareness of the Holocaust, a group that promotes awareness of Nazi Germany’s atrocities and other acts of genocide.
The commemoration included a fireside at Shepard Residential College Tuesday, where 10 students watched a video testimonial of a Holocaust survivor, and a viewing of the film Schindler’s List at the Chabad House.
On Thursday, SHOAH members and other student volunteers stood outside the main entrance of Norris University Center from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and recited the names of Holocaust victims in front of a podium.
“We wanted to keep the memory of those who died alive and ensure we never forget them,” said Education senior and SHOAH President Michal Berkson. “If we forget, we’re bound to let everything repeat itself again.”
Education senior David Grossman, the treasurer of SHOAH, said the group brought Schlesinger to campus to allow students to relate to the Holocaust.
“I’ve seen the impact (a Holocaust survivor’s) speech has on anyone who watches it,” Grossman said. “It just humanizes the entire thing and makes you realize that this happened to real people and real families.”
On the verge of tears, Schlesinger, the grandmother of Weinberg freshman Jeremy Meisel, told the story of how she lost her family members at the hands of Nazi authorities. She escaped death with “God’s help,” she said.
She also told the audience how she met her husband and secretly married him while they were both prisoners in the ghettos.
“(While we were getting married), someone looked out the door so that nobody came,” she said. “We invited 17 people who never showed up. The police guys shot those 17 people on my wedding day.”
Schlesinger survived because her shipping-company manager — who was friends with Oscar Schindler — took a liking to her and got her a coveted spot on the famous Schindler’s List, she said.
She then began working for Schindler’s ammunition company, where she was protected because Schindler paid the Nazis to leave his workers alone.
When a Russian soldier showed up at the door of Schindler’s company on May 8, 1945, and told the Jews they were free to go, Schlesinger said she could not believe it.
“Thank God we survived the war,” she said. “But there were 60 million who did not survive.”
Prof. Peter Hayes, who teaches History of the Holocaust, spoke after Schlesinger and said the Holocaust serves as both a warning and a reproach to what happens when people become intolerant to human differences.
“The meaning of the Holocaust is to make us face up to an enduring question: Who will defend us from whom?” he said. “Even in civilized, educated and industrialized countries, differences are dangerous and are constantly in need of defense.”
Weinberg junior Lauren Skalina, whose grandparents were also Holocaust survivors, said she enjoyed listening to different people’s perspectives on the Holocaust.
“It was interesting to hear Prof. Hayes’ speech, given that he’s not Jewish,” she said. “Both speeches kind of brought a little bit of new insight and it was interesting to hear what somebody else had to say.”
Reach Allan Madrid at [email protected].
