Less than seventy-five years ago, the world witnessed the greatest atrocity and violation of human rights it has ever seen. Under the Nazi regime, eleven million people were murdered, including six million Jewish people.  On Yom HaShoah, Judaism’s national Holocaust Remembrance Day, millions of people utter the words: we will never forget. These words now carry more power than ever before. We will never forget the tragedy the world faced and we pledge to always honor and remember those who perished.

I recently had the opportunity to hear a Holocaust survivor speak at Chabad, a local Jewish community center in Mt. Pleasant. The speaker was Eva Schloss, a survivor of Auschwitz, one of the most notorious concentration camps located in Poland. Eva Schloss is the stepsister and childhood friend of Anne Frank, a young girl who hid in Amsterdam for years only to be caught and sent to her death. Eva, an Austrian native, was fifteen years old when she was captured and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in May 1944. She was separated from her entire family and tragically, her father and brother did not survive. She and her mother spent nine months in captivity until finally being freed by the Russian army in January 1945.

Eighty-seven year old Eva spoke for about an hour and a half at the event, sharing her story. She noted that for a long time, she didn’t speak about what happened to her because she just wanted to forget. She kept it bottled up inside, but once she decided to start talking the words poured out of her like a flood. She now travels all over the country and world recounting her experience. She shared how her family evacuated to several countries, how she met Anne Frank, what hiding was like, and a limited amount about her time in the camp. Surprisingly, she does not hate the German citizens who operated the camps and worked under the Nazi regime. She has forgiven them, but she will never forgive Hitler and other powerful Nazi figures. To be able to forgive people who dehumanized her is pretty remarkable, but she feels as if hate has no purpose in her heart any longer. After telling her story, she opened up the conversation to questions from the audience and I was fortunate enough to be able to ask her one. Eva has written several books (Eva’s Story, The Promise, and After Auschwitz) and I really encourage everyone to read them, as gut-wrenching as it may be.

I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to listen to this woman speak. I think it is incredibly important to listen to as many stories as possible, because soon there will no more first hand accounts of the experience. This is the last generation of people who will get to hear what happened from people who were actually there and witnessed it all. Soon, history books will be the only way to learn about this tragic period of human history. There are not many survivors still alive today, so it is even more important that those who are can share their stories with everyone. I urge everyone, regardless of your race or religion, to go hear a survivor speak if you have the chance. If we do not learn from past mistakes, then history is doomed to repeat itself. Education is the key to combating prejudice and Eva stressed this idea. There is a quote by another Holocaust survivor that reads “People that cannot face their past cannot adapt to the future” and this is crucial to keep in mind.

Finally, I want to leave you with two famous poems:

First They Came by Pastor Martin Niemoller

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

Holocaust by Barbara Sonek

We played, we laughed

we were loved.

We were ripped from the arms of our

parents and thrown into the fire.

We were nothing more than children.

We had a future. We were going to be

lawyers, rabbis, wives, teachers, mothers.

We had dreams, then we had no hope.

We were taken away in the dead of night

like cattle in cars, no air to breathe

smothering, crying, starving, dying.

Separated from the world to be no more.

From the ashes, hear our plea. This

atrocity to mankind can not happen

again. Remember us, for we were the

children whose dreams and lives were

stolen away.