Marking Humanity: Stories, Poems, & Essays by Holocaust Survivors. Shlomit Editor Kriger
members of my family had been murdered during the war. At age 17 I was struggling to regain footing in a world that had been pulled from under my feet.
I left for America with nothing but a desire to rebuild. I had lost my family, my country, and an entire way of life. But I got married, raised two children, and learned to speak a new language. I worked, paid taxes, and gave money to charity. My fellow survivors and family never talked about our experiences. It was like a bad dream that we forgot after waking up in America.
In the media the Holocaust was sensationalized or sentimentalized—it did not ring true. I remembered the fear in the young Nazi guard’s eyes as he reluctantly carried out his orders. In 1994 I saw the film Schindler’s List and was transported back to that terrible time and place. As I watched the survivors pay tribute to the man who saved them, I vowed to break my silence. After waiting 50 years, I was finally ready to tell my story. While I could not speak for the dead, I would honour their memory by sharing my experiences. Thus, I became a teller of stories.
I volunteered to give testimony for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute and the Museum of Tolerance. Speaking as a Jew who comes from far away, I share my family’s story with a diverse audience: Catholics, Muslims, agnostics, the young and old. I speak of loss and redemption and of the evil that people are capable of and the good with which they can heal. The Nazis taught me the power of forgiveness. This enables me to spread my message of tolerance and respect for everyone. People from all walks of life relate to my experiences. I have found that faith and age are not the common denominators. It is by being part of the human family with the realms of emotions that touch us all—grief, terror, despair, joy—that people embrace my determination to ensure that the world will never forget what happened over 60 years ago.
My story is also about the randomness of how we’re placed in life and how we respond. The greatest lesson that I have learned is captured in a quote by renowned physicist Albert Einstein: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” The fact that I am celebrating here with you today confirms that I am living the latter.
Sixty years ago, the world ignored the genocide of the Jews. Today, in America, 25 State curriculum regulations require the Holocaust to be taught and 24 others implicitly encourage it. My life has come full circle. I enjoyed so many opportunities here and always felt that I was riding on a train without a ticket. There was a larger debt to be repaid. For a family that journeyed to this country for freedom, I am finally paying the fare.
Therefore, my message to you is to never give up. Follow your dreams and always have hope. Be involved in your life through your family and friends and through public service. Play a role in making your community and country safe, so that every citizen may enjoy freedom just as I have.
Dora Posluns
Dora Posluns (née Shumska) was born in Berdychiv, a predominantly Jewish city in Ukraine. She was in her teens when World War II began. She and her family fled across Russia and ended up in Uzbekistan in a primitive poverty-stricken area, where they remained for the rest of the war. Her father, however, died of starvation.
Dora later married Wolf Posluns (originally Poslaniec), a Warsaw Jew who had entered Russia with the Polish Armed Forces. Because of her marriage, she and her mother were able to leave Russia for Poland. There, she gave birth to two children. The family later immigrated to Israel, where Dora first began to write poetry. They finally settled in Canada in March 1953.
Residing in Toronto, Ontario, Dora went on to volunteer with numerous organizations. She is, however, most famous for her performances, in which she sang, read her poetry, and generally made her audiences (as large as 200 people) laugh, cry, and feel good. Particularly moving were her annual commemorations of the Holocaust performed at geriatric care centre Baycrest and Baycrest’s Joseph E. and Minnie Wagman Centre. She has three children and four grandchildren.
Write!
Dora Posluns
In front of our eyes they went to the gas chambers
Our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, our sisters
Together with the small children
In front of our eyes they went to the crematoria
They left us behind to testify as witnesses
Their eyes alone spoke in the silence
Their silence, trembling, the last cry from their speaking eyes shrieked
Remember us!
You survivors don’t forget us
G-d did not send us to the gas chambers
A human being like you, like me
The unbelievers who deny the Holocaust
Say it couldn’t have happened, it didn’t happen
We the survivors are the last living witnesses
In front of our eyes, they were taken to the crematoria
The last silent scream in their eyes to us
Write!
Write our names as a witness
You child of a survivor, to the second generation
You child of a survivor, to the third generation
Write our names as a witness
Until the end of all generations
It’s unbelievable … can a human being imagine Auschwitz?
You must write!
Let us write, brothers, in a new Machzor,1 a new Siddur2
While their ashes are dispersed on the walkways
In all our prayers, let us mention them
In all our memorial services, let us mourn them
In all our Kaddish3 prayers, let us recognize them
May they lend beauty to each “Hatikvah”4 that we sing
The death of millions of martyrs is the stuff of legends
Remember not to forget
Never again
Remember us
Write!
1The prayer book that Jewish people use on the High Holidays.
2Jewish prayer book.
3Jewish mourners’ prayer.
4“Hatikvah” (“The Hope”) is Israel’s national anthem.
Samuel Bak
Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Photograph by Andy Abrahamson.
Samuel Bak was born in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), in 1933. He loved to paint from a very young age. During the Holocaust, he and his family moved into the Vilna ghetto. There, at age nine, he held the first exhibition