30th Anniversary Guardians Commemorative Book - Book - Page 135
EDUCATING THE
WORLD
My parents survived
the Holocaust yet lost
everything. Prior to
the war, they each
had spouses and children. When
Hitler came into power their world
ended. My mother asked Polish
neighbors to watch her children
while she went looking for food.
When she returned, they were gone.
The Poles had turned them over to
the Nazis. She never saw them again.
I can’t even imagine the suffering
my dad endured in the barracks at
Auschwitz-Birkenau. As the sole
survivors of their entire families,
alone in the DP camps, they met and
decided to build a new life together.
It is simply incredible that despite the
tremendous deprivation and anguish
they both endured, they chose life and
to build a new family together.
My dad died at 96 in 2001; my mom
at 99 in 2007. When my mother was
90, my sister, brother-in-law, and I
accompanied her on her first trip
back to Poland. She walked all day
long through the streets, seemingly
transformed to the young girl she
had been. We went back to her little
shtetl (town) in Poland, and we saw
where her house and her mother’s
store once stood. My mother was an
only child and very close to her mom.
Until the day she died, she cried not
knowing where—in what hole—her
mother was buried.
It was very emotional visiting Poland
and Auschwitz. Deep down inside I
felt a lot of anger at what happened
to my family. The Museum is the
educator for those who do not have
such personal experiences to reflect
upon. The Museum makes them
realize ‘this really happened.’
Yet here we are 65-plus years later,
and the world is still filled with hate,
with anger, with ignorance, and
tremendous violence. If my gift can
help take some of that away ... if it can
enlighten a person and make them
think, then my gift will have made a
real difference.”
SAFEGUARDING TRUTH FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS l 133
