Miriam Reichman:
We remember all of those who perished and we remember all of those who survived. We remember the horrors of the darkest days of mankind's history, and we also remember the light that was found within it. Those who helped when it was unthinkable that someone would go out of their way to help someone else. We tell the stories of those who survived and who perished so that way their memories may never be forgotten.
Miriam Reichman:
I would now like to introduce Ilana Blumen, who is a senior in the Class of '21. She will be introducing our speaker tonight. Thank you all for coming.
Ilana Blumen:
Sandy Rubenstein is the child of Holocaust survivors. Her father and my grandfather, Joseph Horn was 12 years old when the war began. In 1996, he published his memoir, Mark It With A Stone. In 2008, the book was reprinted in paperback with an introduction written by Sandy from a point of view of a child of a survivor.
Ilana Blumen:
Sandy speaks to middle and high school students as well as adults. Sharing her family's experience during the Holocaust is a calling, a compelling force for her. As she recounts her father's story, she incorporates archival photos, excerpts from his memoir and video clips from his show and testimony in which he speaks directly about his experiences. She talks about the importance of memory and legacy, and addresses the need for young people like us to reflect on our own moral responsibilities to stand up against today's hatred, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
Ilana Blumen:
As survivors are no longer with us, Sandy's presentation allows new generations to witness history firsthand. Additionally, in conjunction with the USC Shoah Foundation, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City and other organizations, Sandy helps second and third generation descendants of Holocaust survivor share their own family legacy.
Ilana Blumen:
She's a Master Teacher at the USC Shoah Foundation and has developed a curriculum utilizing the testimonies from the USC Shoah archives republican private schools across the country. In addition, she's a Master Teacher Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Ilana Blumen:
We'll leave 15 minutes at the end for Q&A. During the presentation if you guys have any questions you'd like answered, please private message them over to Remy Fields and without further ado, I'm going to pass it over to my aunt, Sandy Rubenstein.
Sandy Rubenstein:
I thank so many of you. Remy Fields and Rabbi Sanger-Miller and all of you at the Brandeis Hillel and especially my niece Ilana, she's the reason why I'm here tonight. As Miriam said, it is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. This is the month actually when we commemorate the lives and the heroism of the six million Jews who perished as well as those who survived.
Sandy Rubenstein:
I am a child of survivors, both my parents survived the Holocaust. When the war began in 1939, my father was 12 years old, my mother was 10 and at war's end, my father was the sole survivor of his family.
Sandy Rubenstein:
This is a picture of our family in front of our house in Brooklyn. I am the older sister and Ilana's mom, Ellen was not yet born. But I was old enough to understand that we were different. I saw the unexplained tattoos on their inner arms. When I asked my mother where she got them, she was very dismissive and just said, "Oh we got them during the war." Information was not forthcoming and I knew my parents spoke English with an accent and I had no grandparents.
Sandy Rubenstein:
At the age of 10, I found a black notebook in a basement closet with my father's familiar handwriting scrolled on the yellow loosely pages. I fell upon the notebook knowing I was on the verge of discovering the answers to so many of my unspoken questions about his past. Yes, as I read, I learned the painful truth about how my father lost his entire family.
Sandy Rubenstein:
These are my parents, Joseph and Dinah Horn. My mother passed away in 2016 at the age of 87. When we were cleaning out her apartment, Ilana and I found my father's wallet. It'd been in the top draw of his desk many years untouched since he passed away. I opened the wallet and found the predictable credit cards and photos, but there was also a yellow folded piece of paper. Something my father had written and kept in his wallet as a constant reminder. It said, "Remember, hate is tenacious, memory is fragile."
Sandy Rubenstein:
As Miriam and Ilana said, he published his memoir, Mark It With A Stone in 1996 and this was a fulfillment of a lifelong dream. He was also interviewed by Steven Spielberg, Shoah Foundation in 1995. In addition to his memoir, he left behind this three-hour visual and oral testimony, which was a gift for his family and for future generations. It was a tribute to the loved ones who perished and a record of his ordeal, and so tonight you will hear his story. It is about sharing memory and why it is important to do so.
Sandy Rubenstein:
As survivors age and are no longer with us, this primary source allows us and future generations to witness history firsthand. Here, my father speaks about his desire to survive.
Joseph Horn:
Auschwitz was the culmination of all my experiences. I remember when I left Auschwitz one day in November when they evacuated us, my great dream and desire was to survive, to bear witness. That was the greatest desire I had, was to survive and bear witness.
Speaker 5:
For your family?
Joseph Horn:
For my family, for my friends, and for what I saw in Auschwitz and what is indelibly marked in my brain. If I live to be 1,000 some of the things that I saw, I remember as if I saw them yesterday.
Sandy Rubenstein:
As students at Brandeis, you know that the Holocaust is a dark period in history that causes many questions. How could this have happened? Why couldn't more people help? Why didn't more people help? But most importantly, what can we learn?
Sandy Rubenstein:
I believe that when we talk about statistics such as six million, it's impossible to comprehend the enormity of such a catastrophe. But to tell one personal story, that I believe has the power to touch the hearts of others. It is my hope that you are touched by his experiences. It's my hope that you become more aware of the profound connection between history and the choices each of you makes each day in your own lives because you are our future leaders.
Sandy Rubenstein:
We must ask, how does one learn from the mistakes of the past to raise the bar of decency in its present and in the future? Bigotry is deeply embedded in our society. Prejudice, violence, crimes against humanity, genocide are still happening in our world today. Darfur, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, the Rohingya Muslims fleeing the violence in Myanmar and most recently the Uighur Muslims in China.
Sandy Rubenstein:
We are living in a time of COVID, it's a pandemic that has upended our lives and the world's newest disease has unleashed another wave of the world's oldest hate, antisemitism. Over the last few years, domestic terrorism targeting Jews and other minorities has escalated.
Sandy Rubenstein:
In Charlottesville, Virginia, a white nationalist rally erupted into violence. Carrying flags with swastikas, neo-Nazis armed with semi-automatic riffle stormed the streets shouting, "Blood and soil, Jews will not replace us." Then on October 26th 2018, armed with an AR-15 assault weapon, a man shouting antisemitic slurs open fire inside a crowded Pittsburgh synagogue during the morning service, killing 11 congregants simply because of their faith. It was a rampage described as the deadliest against the Jewish community in the United States and other fatal attacks have followed.
Sandy Rubenstein:
On January 6th there was an attack at the Capitol, fueled by white supremacists and militia groups. And of the many hate symbols on display, one was of a long-bearded man wearing a black camp Auschwitz sweatshirt emblazoned with a skull and cross guns.
Sandy Rubenstein:
The question is, will the world ever learn? It's a complex question that doesn't have an easy answer, but we do know that we must speak out. We must not remain silent, and we must continue to try to combat what it is that allows hate to take root and grow.
Sandy Rubenstein:
Let me tell you a little bit about my dad. To me, he was handsome, wise, sensitive, and strong. He embraced life passionately. He appreciated each day and he loved this country fiercely ever grateful for its dedication to freedom. He was always my role model and remains so to this day. As his daughter, I've always felt the desire to measure up, to follow in his foot steps, to be like him, a person of conscience and strong moral character.
Sandy Rubenstein:
He was born in a city called Radom in Poland on November 15th, 1926. He is the youngest in a family of six and he remembers his home as a place of love, security, and traditional Jewish life. Were it not for the terrible antisemitism he had to live with, his childhood would have been idle. There was much prejudice and bigotry toward Jews in Poland at that time. But for my father, the full effect of this hatred was not realized until he witnessed a soccer game played one summer afternoon.
Sandy Rubenstein:
It was 1938, he was 11 years old and now I'm going to read an excerpt from his book about that day. "One day while walking home from the railroad station, my father gave me some very good news. One of the Jewish soccer teams for Radom, the Hapoel was scheduled to play the Polish team in Pionki the following Sunday. I loved to play soccer and loved to watch it played."
Sandy Rubenstein:
"Two of my cousins, twins played striker on the Hapoel. All week that upcoming match was the first thing I thought of when I woke each morning. I even arranged with my mother to have a basket of goodies to hand out to my cousins and the others at halftime."
Sandy Rubenstein:
"The day of the event finally came. I was at the stadium ahead of everybody. I watched the bus with the Radom players pull in and was very proud of the healthy-looking, Jewish, young men getting off. I greeted my cousins and showed them the basket that mother had filled with lemons, apples, strawberries, and a jar of lemonade."
Sandy Rubenstein:
"When it was time to play ball, the Jewish team took the field dressed in blue and white jerseys and lined up in the center of the ballpark. My heart sunk when the spectators greeted them with hisses and antisemitic catcalls. And then the Polish home team ran out dressed in red and white and the cheers were deafening."
Sandy Rubenstein:
"Play began and within five minutes the Hapoel team scored. Because I was surrounded by Poles, I was afraid to cheer, but still it felt so good inside. As if to confirm my happiness, they scored another goal within minutes. By halftime, the score stood at two to zero. I took my basket of goodies and ran to the Jewish side where I quickly distributed my treasure trope. I was a little kid in the company of big boys and nobody paid much attention to me except my two cousins. But as I milled among the players, I sensed a lack of excitement. They seemed strangely subdued for a team with a solid halftime lead."
Sandy Rubenstein:
"When the whistle blew and it was time to go back on the field, one of my cousins leaned over and whispered in my ear, 'Go home now, we are going to lose.' I was stunned and didn't move, and then he ran on to the field, turned and motioned again for me to go home. And then I understood, they had to throw the game to avoid a massacre and he didn't want me to see their defeat. I walked home my spirit completely crushed."
Sandy Rubenstein:
"Somehow the precariousness of being Jewish sunk in at that moment more deeply than ever before. And that afternoon on the way home from that soccer game, I decided to fight hatred and bigotry for the rest of my life even though the struggle was about to become harder than I could possible have imagined."
Sandy Rubenstein:
"Political discussions took place around the dinner table as the clouds of war were darkening. Nazi Germany was re-arming at a frantic place. Kristallnacht had taken place in Germany and on September 1st, 1939, Hitler's tanks rumbled into Poland and the city of Radom. My father was 12 years old and explains what it was like on that day.
Joseph Horn:
A plane flew overhead, over the city and it left a mog which evidently was the sign to the ground troops that the city is empty and it is ready to be entered. After about half hour, I heard a mighty roar coming in from the western side of the city. We knew that the Germans were entering the city and so I overcame my fright, all my emotions and as a curious child I ran to the road that I knew the Germans were coming in from. And I watched a whole array of this great German might tank after tank, after tank with these tankers and their goggles with this tremendous might with the long guns on their tanks, and that made a tremendous impression on me. I just thought that this kind of might will conquer the world, no ifs or buts about it. That's how powerful they look at the time.
Sandy Rubenstein:
With the occupation came a spade of new laws, and at first these laws applied to the general public but soon specific laws against Jews only were passed. All Jewish schools were closed. Jewish bank accounts were frozen. Jews could no longer practice their professions. His parents insisted he join a clandestine school. It was very costly and dangerous, but education was considered as important as life itself. And for the first time he applied himself to his studies.
Sandy Rubenstein:
November 1939 my father turned 13 and his parents decided despite the dire consequences, that he should celebrate his bar mitzvah and here he shares that memory.
Joseph Horn:
We had a bar mitzvah rite in an apartment that was owned by a rabbi who lived in the apartment complex that we lived in. He had created a room that was camouflaged with a wardrobe so that no one would know that there is an entry there, there's a room there. It was in this room that we went in to pray because praying of course under Germans was forbidden under the pain of death immediately as soon as they entered, but my parents insisted. We did go through this ritual.
Joseph Horn:
We went into this room in the rabbi's house that was camouflaged with this wardrobe. When I was about to begin the reciting of the Torah, Germans came in. We heard on the outside the-
Speaker 5:
Shuffling.
Joseph Horn:
... rough shuffling with the screams, and everybody froze. The Germans actually came in to the room, to the apartment where the rabbi lived. They asked loudly, "Where are the males? Where are the men?" Because they were... At that point it was early in the war, they would come down and raid the Jewish neighborhoods and grab males so that they would work for them and abuse them for whatever reasons they had. They were on one of these raids that they came into that apartment.
Joseph Horn:
Well we were very close to having someone come in there, because they actually went to open the wardrobe doors from the other side and one of them went into the wardrobe to look. But somehow he didn't find and so eventually they left and I asked the people that were present that if I should continue reading the Torah and everybody said, "Yes, go ahead and do it." And so this is how we celebrated my bar mitzvah.
Sandy Rubenstein:
It wasn't really safe for males, older males to be around and so his older brother Abram who was 20 years old at the time decided to try to escape to the Russian occupied side of Poland. And so the family paid smugglers to take Abram and in the dead of night, defying the curfew, my father accompanied him to a track stop where a vehicle was to take him to the boarder. He said goodbye to his brother that night and never saw him again.
Sandy Rubenstein:
In March of 1941, the Ghetto in Radom was formed and more than 35,000 Jews were penned into a small area. Conditions rapidly deteriorated, food was scarce and terrible rumors began to spread creating a constant state of fear. Words like deportation, resettlement, transfer, expulsion crept into the vocabulary and nobody understood their true meaning.
Sandy Rubenstein:
My father and his brother Eli worked a 12-hour shift in a munitions factory. The Germans had deluded the Jews to believe that by working that would keep the family safe, but that was not to be because a mass deportation of Jews in Radom occurred in August 15th, 1942. My father's mother, father, and sister Bluma were taken that day. They were sent to Treblinka, a death camp where they met a terrible end. Here, he speaks about his brother Eli.
Joseph Horn:
He was born in 1923 and Eli was what we all know and call a tough guy. He couldn't take the abuse from the Gentile boys and he didn't, he fought back. He was constantly in trouble and...
Speaker 5:
In trouble with your father or in trouble with?
Joseph Horn:
In trouble with everybody. He was in trouble with my father because he had the wrong friends, and the reason he had the wrong friends was because he always wanted to fight back, because he couldn't take the abuse of the Polish kid called him dirty Jew. He couldn't let him get away with it and that created all kinds of problems.
Joseph Horn:
He was constantly in fights and he'd come home with the black and blue marks with eyes, with torn pants and torn jackets and all kinds of wounds. He was in constant trouble and he was constantly fighting. Unfortunately, he eventually paid for this toughness with his life under the Germans, because he resisted a foreman on the job after the foreman had ridiculed him to the point where he couldn't take it any more. He hit back and because he hit back, he was tortured and then shot.
Sandy Rubenstein:
At this point my father was 15 years old and all alone. Soon after, he was sent to a concentration camp called Blizyn in a nearby town, where he spent 16 months as a prisoner with hunger a constant companion.
Sandy Rubenstein:
All belongings had to be surrendered except for shoes and belts. My father desperately wanted to keep pictures of all the members of his family as well as his friends. These pictures were his greatest treasure, the last link to the world of his childhood.
Sandy Rubenstein:
While he stood in line for a body search in the cold weather, he desperately tried to stuff these pictures into his shoe. He was in the middle of the line when Paul Nell, the SS commandant, pulled a boy of about 14 away from the table. He ripped the boys shoe away from him and pulled out a handful of pictures. He tore the pictures into shreds and scattered them into the mud. Then he took out his gun and shot the boy point blank in the forehead. So when it was my father's turn, he gave up his pictures and with it the last connection to humanity as he once knew it.
Joseph Horn:
I'll tell you, what kept me to decide to survive was something else. At this camp was, as I said, a terrible place and epidemics would breakout periodically. One of the epidemics I fell victim to was typhoid epidemic and I got sick. Maybe one out of three survived.
Joseph Horn:
I remember there was a fellow by the name of Sal Mintzberg who was one of the inmate administrators of the camp who helped me after my sickness, and for some reason he was very good to me. This human exchange on the fact that not everybody is so bad, that gave me hope and it helped a great deal. He brought me in and he gave me another job and vision and he helped me out. He took me to the kitchen after my sickness and he told the cook to give me extra rations every day until I recover.
Joseph Horn:
It was things like this in the camp that a young man of my age was able to start life a new. Get new hope and get going again, and faced whatever was coming one more time.
Sandy Rubenstein:
In June of 1944, he was sent from Blizyn to Auschwitz.
Joseph Horn:
When I arrived I was tattooed.
Speaker 5:
What was your number?
Joseph Horn:
B1477.
Speaker 5:
Again, would you repeat how old you were when this happened to you?
Joseph Horn:
It was in 1944, that makes me 17 years old.
Sandy Rubenstein:
As you know, this is the train entrance to Auschwitz through which cattle cars carrying hundreds of thousands of Jews and others from all over Europe arrived.
Sandy Rubenstein:
My father was assigned a work detail that placed him close to the arrival ramp. And from this vantage point he was able to witness the many, many transports. He witnessed the selections. He witnessed the walk to the gas chambers. He witnessed the destruction of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children. This is a picture of the arrival ramp in the summer of 1944 when a transport from Hungary had just arrived.
Joseph Horn:
There was one point where a train came in from Hungary, and a lot of Hungarian people came out and they were in the Jewish frock. They were religious Orthodox people and a lot of them walked from the ramp into the gas chamber with their prayer books wide open and praying and shaking, praying and shaking.
Joseph Horn:
I remember we were not allowed to speak to them even though they passed us within a few feet. I remember one time there was a very learned looking I would say a rabbi, beard, the open book and for some reason they stopped. There was something wrong on ahead and they stopped for a while. And he looked at me and he looked at me, and he said, "[Hungarian]."
Speaker 5:
Which means?
Joseph Horn:
"You're a Jew," and I said nothing because we weren't allowed to talk to them. I was afraid to talk to him, and then if I did, what was I going to tell him? But he insisted and he said to me, "Are we going [Yiddish]? You understand what that means," and I was afraid to answer and I couldn't say anything. I didn't want to tell him, but I remember saying in Yiddish, "It would be a good time rabbi for the Messiah to come right now." This is what I said to him.
Speaker 5:
What was his reaction?
Joseph Horn:
Then they ordered to march on and he marched on to oblivion.
Joseph Horn:
I don't know, I need to live many years to be able to describe what I saw on that ramp. They were killing Poles, they were killing Russians. Their lives were almost as bad as ours, but there was no genocide of Poles, there's no genocide of Russians. They were not sending them into the crematory. They were not sending them into the gas chamber. That was reserved primarily for Jews and in a few instances for Gypsies.
Sandy Rubenstein:
In November of 1944, after five months, Auschwitz was evacuated, the Russians were approaching. My father was now in an interim camp called Liberos where he had little access to food. After about six weeks, he was initiated in losing his will to live. Each day the temperature was well below zero.
Sandy Rubenstein:
In January 1945, a request was made for mechanics. 500 men, including my father stepped forward hoping to escape the terrible conditions at Liberos. There were no tools to assess who was qualified. Thankful for what he had learned in the clandestine school, he passed an oral test by answering the question, how do you measure the circumference of a circle? Although he was not a mechanic, he was chosen and sent with 60 others to an island on the Baltic Sea called Pennemunde, where the production of the V-2 rocket continued in underground factories.
Sandy Rubenstein:
Outside, it was snowing and the wind was blowing through the way. A group of prisoners marched into the camp and damped several bodies from hand drawn wheelbarrows, the bodies were frozen stiff. My father asked a prisoner next to him, "Where did they come from?" "From the commando that shovel snow with the air field," he said. "Every day the prisoners who have no other jobs are sent to the air field to keep the runways open. If you want to live, don't ever get on that commando."
Sandy Rubenstein:
My father was assigned to be in a group that reported to a kind German man named Herkent who quickly assessed that my father was not a trained mechanic. And he said, "I'm sorry I can't use you," and my father broke down and cried. "Please sir," he begged, "if you reject me they'll send me to the air field to shovel snow. I won't last a week there," and he told him of Liberos and why he pretended to be a mechanic, Herkent took pity on him and assigned him the special task of keeping the machines lubricated.
Sandy Rubenstein:
But then came a day when Herkent did not show up for work, and my father was transferred to the air field. The cold was so bitter and the wind so ferocious, it was difficult to breath. The two guards informed the inmates that anyone stepping beyond the staked out area would be shot. After several days of exposure to the elements, he didn't have the strength to live. He slept only fitfully, his short life spinning in and out of dreams, blurred images of his parents, brothers, and sister. He began to long to join them.
Sandy Rubenstein:
One freezing morning he walked over to the nearest guard and asked permission to relieve himself. On his way, he made the decision to keep walking past the staked out area under penalty of death. Better to be shot by a guard than go back as a frozen cadaver.
Sandy Rubenstein:
He thought of his mother's face, he wanted this vision to be his last. Waiting for the shot to ring out and holding his head high to be a better target, he heard yelling, "Stop or I'll shoot." My father kept walking until he heard footsteps behind him, it was the guard. "You didn't shoot," my father said, "I never killed anyone yet and I am not going to start with you." Later on when the camp commandant heard the story, his job with Herkent was reinstated.
Sandy Rubenstein:
In the spring of 1945, he was taken to an evacuated German military base, Hohne Bergen and one morning the SS disappeared. The air raid sirens blew, a trio of American planes flew overhead, liberation and here he reads from his manuscript about that day.
Joseph Horn:
On April 15th, I looked out the window and I saw downstairs British armies with a armored vehicle five pointed allied star. The allies had arrived. I held my head in my hands. I no longer cared about through, I knew I would never crawl again. Questions kept popping into my head, who am I? What am I? Where am I? Is anyone left of my family? Will there be life as I once knew it?
Joseph Horn:
Eventually I pulled myself together and went downstairs. British soldiers were all over the camp dispensing crackers and a milk like substance. Strangely, I found my need for revenge had already left. With my English I had learned clandestine school, I asked the British officer about state of the war. "The Nazis, caput," was his answer. Those were the sweetest words I heard all my life.
Joseph Horn:
The real shock of liberation came a few days later when the Polish survivors of Bergen-Belsen arranged a liberation war. I walked into the hall dressed in a jacket and slacks obtained from the Red Cross feeling like a human being for the first time in years. The band was playing a song called Golden Chrysanthemums. At that point the memory of my experiences clashed with the unlimited possibilities of my future.
Joseph Horn:
My feet below the knees went numb. I grabbed a chair and barely managed to sit down. A pretty girl noticed and came over to me, "Hi, my name is Rena, are you all right?" "I think so," I said, "It's just that this is so much." She sat down next to me. "I know," she said, "I'm Jewish too. I survived the war with my mother by pretending to be Polish Catholics. I thought we were the only Jews that made it." "I know the feeling. My name is Joseph and I'm so very happy to meet you." I was still struggling to express my feelings when she threw her hands around my neck. "Never mind that now. Come, let's dance," and so we danced that night. Oh how we danced.
Sandy Rubenstein:
We must listen to the voices of the past. We, the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors represent the continuation of their lives. We embody them wherever we are at any given moment. We are the proof of their existence. We reflect their light. We honor their memory.
Sandy Rubenstein:
Bret Stephens, a journalist for the New York Times reflects, "We are members of a religion that cherishes life and memory alike," and believes that we live best and understand best when we remember well. In this month of Holocaust Remembrance, it's worth pausing to consider how those who survived help us to see what we must never forget.
Sandy Rubenstein:
This a photograph of a memorial at Treblinka, it's called the Garden of Memories. Each stone here represents a city and the number, the size of the stone represents the number of Jews from that city who were murdered here.
Sandy Rubenstein:
This stone says Radom. This stone marks the final resting place metaphorically of my father's mother, father, and sister Bluma and it is also the significance of the title of his book, Mark It With A Stone.
Joseph Horn:
This is a picture of myself taken probably several weeks after we were liberated. For better or for worse, this is what I looked like. I had already gained a few pounds but I was still pretty skinny. Probably no more than 120 pounds at the time.
Joseph Horn:
In the back where I point is my mother, that is the best picture that I have of her, I have no other. And in front, right here where I point is my sister Bluma, this is the only thing that I have of my sister and my mother. This is a picture taken of myself and my wife Dinah, probably a few days after she came to the United States.
Joseph Horn:
As I said, I came here in the beginning of 1947. She came in the summer of '49, so this is the summer of '49. If I remember correctly, it's probably one of the first pictures we took the two of us together after her arrival.
Sandy Rubenstein:
Here's a clip to show a little bit about what life was like after.
Joseph Horn:
My great dream and desire was to survive, to bear witness. That was the greatest desire I had, was to survive and bear witness.
Sandy Rubenstein:
This is a family picture of our family together in April 2014 when my mom was still with us. This is a photo we took two Passovers ago, so this is my sister Bonnie next to me and my sister Ellen, that's Ilana's mom standing behind her. Thank you very much.
Aimee Schwartz:
Thank you very much for sharing your father's inspiring story of strength, courage, and hope. We now have a few questions on the chat. The first is, "Can you explain how the concentration camp selections worked?"
Sandy Rubenstein:
From a historical point of view, I think it was different in different camps. For example, when my father was sent from Blizyn to Auschwitz, he did not go through a selection process. He was already a prisoner and they required more slave labor to build barracks or whatever it is they needed to be built, so he was just sent on a cattle car. He talks about this in his testimony where he sees that the bill of lading says Auschwitz. They were just sent so they did not go through a selection.
Sandy Rubenstein:
At Auschwitz, for example, over the summer of 1944, when most of the Hungarian Jews were sent, there were 500,000 Hungarian Jews who were lost that summer, many, many of them came to Auschwitz. The selection process was, the people who were young and able to work were sent in one direction. The people who were older and the children were sent in another direction. I think they were separated in lines of five.
Sandy Rubenstein:
I remember actually my mother actually went through a selection process at Auschwitz. She was with her sisters and she was about 14, maybe 15. They propped her up to make her look a little bit taller and a little bit older so that she wouldn't be sent to the side with the children. The people who were on the line, the older people who the Nazis felt were not going to be able to be productive, were sent straight to the gas chamber.
Sandy Rubenstein:
If you visit the Holocaust Museum and I'm sure many of you have, there is a very powerful and terribly upsetting model, a model of exactly what happened. Once the trains came in, how it was emptied, who was chosen, who was not. Mengele was supposedly the doctor who was wearing a white coat and deciding who was going to the right, who was going to the left.
Aimee Schwartz:
Another question is, "What are we to do now that there are fewer and fewer survivors left?"
Sandy Rubenstein:
That is a very good question, and that is something that I had been contemplating since my father passed away in 1999. He was only 72. That may sound old to you, but it was pretty young. I'm sure you have grandparents who are even older than that right now.
Sandy Rubenstein:
That was a big question, because we, for example, the children and grandchildren were not there, so we can't speak to it from that perspective. This was an idea that, a concept that crystallized for me one day when I was out in Utah skiing. I had just this connection in my mind, I knew we had this memoir that he had written. This was in 2007, which was eight years after he passed away and I knew we had the testimony. I had never seen it. It was on a VCR tape in my mother's apartment on a shelf gathering dust, and I watched it then for the very first time, which was about 13 years after he actually gave the testimony. Of course, I was hysterically crying while I was watching it, but as soon as I watched it, I knew that his voice and his presence needed to be out there.
Sandy Rubenstein:
Remember, I'm a teacher also, so the combination of my gifts, my strengths, being a teacher and also being a Holocaust descendant. Also, having gone to the Shoah Foundation training and the Holocaust Museum training, I had this concept of incorporating the voice of the survivor to help tell the story. I do speak to second and third generation and help them to think of their own personal creative ways to share their family stories.
Sandy Rubenstein:
One person in my workshop who was the child of Michelins actually, her father who was Jewish was a very talented musician. She actually created original music, that's part of the way she tells her story. Then as far as the academics go, the Holocaust Museum has incredible resources for teachers and every year there are two different programs. One is called the Belfer program, the other is for Master Teacher Fellows. The intensity and the focus of how to teach, how to approach... This is a very difficult subject to teach to middle, high school, college students and so on.
Sandy Rubenstein:
And so I think that, that's an important piece of how to continue to tell the stories. The Shoah Foundation has a program also called iWitness, I don't know if any of you have ever downloaded it, but I mean you could go to that website and you could look for, my father's testimony is there. They're 1,000 of the 52,000 testimonies that are available on the USC Shoah website.
Sandy Rubenstein:
As a teacher, let's say you're teaching about the ghettos, then you could actually search and pull up clips of individual survivors who are no longer alive for the most part, but who tell about what happened in the ghetto for example. That's what we have going forward and I think that is the most unbelievable gift that Steven Spielberg has given to us.
Miriam Reichman:
Sandy, can you please repeat the link that you just said or the website?
Sandy Rubenstein:
USC, which stands for the University of Southern California, the USC Shoah Foundation. The Shoah Foundation is housed at the Doheny Library at the University of Southern California. That's its location and the name of what you're looking for is iWitness. I like in iPad, little I.
Sandy Rubenstein:
My father's testimony is one of the 1,000 testimonies that are accessible online. There are lessons available too. There's a lot of information for teachers. It's really a question too of, is Holocaust education mandated in the state? I believe right now there are, I don't know, seven or eight states that mandate Holocaust education so that's part of the problem too.
Sandy Rubenstein:
I will say though that, for example the group of teachers I was with in my Master Teacher Fellow group came from all over the country and all over the world. There were 20 of us and one was from Oklahoma, another person was from North Dakota, another person was from Mississippi, someone else came from Belgium and so forth. I was very pleased to see that there weren't very many New Yorkers or people from... There was actually one person from Massachusetts. She actually teaches in the Natick Schools.
Aimee Schwartz:
Another question is, "Where did you get the photo of your father's mother and sister?"
Sandy Rubenstein:
Yeah, that is a common question that I get, because he had to give up all his photos. Those were the only photos that we have of... I don't have a photo of his father. There is a photo that I do have of his brother Eli, but we don't have anything of his oldest brother Abram.
Sandy Rubenstein:
If you noticed in that photograph, there were five people, there were several other people with his mother and sister. That photograph actually was sent to relatives of someone in that photo in Palestine before the war. And so when the war was over and this particular family who knew my father's mother and sister, once they realized that he had survived, they sent him the photo and that's how he got it. It's this little tiny, it's a tiny picture.
Aimee Schwartz:
The final question is, "What can we do to ensure that such a thing never happens again?" Can you speak specifically as your experience as an educator of the Holocaust as well?
Sandy Rubenstein:
I don't think there's one answer to this question. I don't know the answer to this question, but I do know that, now that I've spoken and you have heard my father's story, you too have become a witness. I do believe that education is key. I've seen this with my own students. I began teaching about the Holocaust to 11-year-olds with the book Number The Stars, which you might have read when you were younger.
Sandy Rubenstein:
The reason why I began that is because first of all, it's a story about choice. Think about what happened in Denmark, how they saved all of their Jews. It's really quite remarkable, that's what they did. They chose to help. They ferried all their Jews across the sea to Sweden to safety there.
Sandy Rubenstein:
I think about when I teach my kids, well each of you has a choice, every day in your own lives. Who do you want to be? I'm not saying it's easy to make a difficult choice that's the right choice, but imagine what might have happened if other nations in Europe had decided, had made the choice to rebuff the demands of the Nazis, of Hitler and not cooperate.
Sandy Rubenstein:
I do believe that when you tell a personal story, I believe that literature, teaching through literature and also through history. Trying to help kids to make connections as to how we have to continue to work for justice. Not only for the Jewish causes which of course is true, but for justice in general.
Sandy Rubenstein:
Sometimes I feel as though we're spitting against the wind, and it's like uh. Look at what's been happening in this country over the last number of years, but yet there are signs of hope and there are signs of change. We have to believe and we have to continue to speak out, to write, to get involved and to be this little link, this little cog in the wheel that helps others to see the light.
Nathan Miller:
I just wanted to conclude the event by thanking Sandy so much for coming to speak to us and sharing your father's incredible story. We so appreciate you taking the time out of your night to come share with us, and we really learned a lot. Thank you to everyone for attending this event, and I believe a member of the Hillel staff will put a link to Sandy's website into the chat so you can do more research about her father's story and look for her father's book. Thank you so much for attending tonight.