As darkness fell Monday night, Northwestern students gathered to remember the Holocaust. Students, faculty and staff who attended the Yom Hashoah Memorial Evening donned yellow Stars of David emblazoned with the reminder “Never Forget.”
The event in Annenberg Hall, hosted by Students Helping Organize Awareness About the Holocaust, drew about 50 students. The evening included reflections by Rabbi Josh Feigelson, a flute performance by Bienen freshman Jenny Bendelstein and a keynote speech by Holocaust survivor Ralph Rehbock.
Just one day after the actual Yom Hashoah (Holocaust remembrance day) on Sunday, students gathered and were encouraged to act as “constituents and custodians of memory” by Feigelson.
“On whose behalf are we not to forget?” he said. “Part of our inheritance … is learning the facts of history and kindling the flames of memory.”
Keynote speaker and NU alumnus Ralph Rehbock described leaving his home country of Germany with his mother and father in 1938 for the U.S. He and his family arrived in Berlin to receive their visas on Nov. 8, 1938, and there witnessed Kristallnacht, a night of anti-Jewish violence and internment by German Nazis.
While they managed to obtain their visas, Rehbock and his mother went ahead of his father but were not yet safe. As they moved east toward the English Channel and freedom, they were stopped from boarding a train in the Netherlands and strip searched by Nazi soldiers. A Dutch man tapped Rehbock’s mother on the shoulder and told her to grab her son by the hand and run after him when he tipped his hat. She did, and they made it safely onto a local Dutch train that took them to England.
“You can’t know what might have been, what that next train the Nazis told us to wait for would have been,” he said. “But we were safe. And we were free.”Rehbock wrapped up his talk with a reminder of how important one person can be in making an impact.
“Think of the individuals who made the difference,” he said. “It’s the difference between me being here tonight and not getting out of Germany at all.”
Following the flute performance and two poems, SHOAH President Ariel Drehobl lit candles as everyone rose and recited the Mourner’s Kaddish. The tone was reflective as students filed out, which was part of SHOAH’s mission for the evening, Drehobl said.
“This is Northwestern’s way of remembering, not just the Holocaust but genocide in general,” the Weinberg sophomore said. “This is something we can never forget because it can never be allowed to happen again.”
Students sometimes forget they can effect change in the world, which is something SHOAH wants to encourage, Drehobl said. The group was dormant prior to last year, but it had a resurgence and is aiming to do more programming with other groups in the future to further their goal of social justice, she said.
“We can’t change the past,” she said. “But we can prevent things from happening in the future.”[email protected]
