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Reporting from Rehovot: A sister I never knew delivers an eternal Holocaust message
By Zahava Scherz
As the child of Polish Jews who had survived the terrors of World War II, I was always aware of the Holocaust — but at a distance.
Then, when I was 14 years old, I came across a red photo album, hidden in my parents' home outside Tel Aviv. The photographs in the album were from that dark time. They showed my father Yaacov Laskier's family, all of whom had been exterminated in the Holocaust. All I had known previously was that before the war, my father and his four brothers and four sisters belonged to a well-to-do, respected Jewish family.
(Photo - Laskier: Died in a Nazi concentration camp at age 14 / Family picture via Zahava Scherz)
In the album, there was a photo of a girl embracing a little boy. She was about 8 years old, with beautiful black, smooth hair. With a heavy heart, I turned to my father and asked him who those children were, and who was the girl who resembled me. And then, for the first time, my father told me about Rutka and Joachim-Henius, his children with his first wife, Dvorah Hampel. All three of them had perished in Auschwitz. Rutka was 14 when she died, exactly my age when I found out about her existence. Henius was 7 years old.
When I met Rutka
That is how I found out about my father's deceased children, and about his first life in Bedzin, a city in southwestern Poland where Jews had lived for centuries in peace until German troops arrived in September 1939. Four days after they occupied Bedzin, the Germans burned the town's historic synagogue to the ground, after locking some 200 Jews inside.
Six decades later, in 2006, my life was changed by an even more startling revelation, when the world and I learned that my half-sister Rutka had kept a diary during the war that had recently been made public. In these pages, I met Rutka for the first time: a very talented and beautiful girl, who, while being aware that she would not survive, wanted to document those days, in hopes future readers could follow her life and understand her death. When the diary was published, first in Poland and then in Israel, it was hailed for opening an illuminating new window into Jewish life during the Holocaust.
Although her notebook is far shorter, Rutka's prose, like Anne Frank's, transports readers directly into the experience of a persecuted adolescent living under the Nazi's occupation in a world that gets narrower and narrower until the bitter end. Its most gripping scene is Rutka's first-person account of a German Aktion in August 1942, in which the entire Jewish community of Bedzin was summoned to an outdoor stadium, then ruthlessly sorted into groups whose destinies were stark: a chance for life — or a death sentence to the nearby extermination complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most striking was the fact that Rutka clearly knew that Jewish adults, and even children, who were taken to the camp were being killed in the gas chambers.
The next generations
I recently visited an eighth-grade class in Bedzin, where students were studying Rutka's Notebook and conducting interdisciplinary projects "in the footsteps of Rutka Laskier." I listened to the students read paragraphs from my sister's diary and explain with love and compassion why they chose them. I will never forget this experience, which showed how meaningful her words can be for the young generation.
We must commemorate the lives of those lost to racial and political fanaticism — and not just on days like Holocaust Remembrance Day this Friday. We must not be afraid to remember, and more important, we must teach our children about the past. I applaud French President Nicolas Sarkozy's proposal to institute a nationwide Holocaust educational program. He is correct that ignorance could cause the repetition of this abominable event — whether it is rooted in anti-Semitism or any other hatred. All nations should follow France's lead and create new ways to remember the past and teach tolerance.
At a time when genocide remains a horrible reality in too many parts of the world, Rutka Laskier, Anne Frank and other Holocaust diarists remind us of the sanctity of each life that is taken in the mass crime that is genocide.
I feel confident that if my sister Rutka could have lived to speak to us today, she would encourage us never to forget the bitter fruits of racial and political fanaticism and to ensure that our children learn the same lesson. But then again, in a sense she still lives, and will always live to tell her story, in the moving pages of her notebook.
Zahava (Laskier) Scherz, Ph.D., is a faculty member of the Department of Science Teaching at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and the author of two essays in Rutka's Notebook: A Voice From the Holocaust.
Source: Zahava Scherz. A sister I never knew delivers an eternal Holocaust message. Blogs @USA Today (28 April 2008) [FullText and Comments]
As the child of Polish Jews who had survived the terrors of World War II, I was always aware of the Holocaust — but at a distance.
Then, when I was 14 years old, I came across a red photo album, hidden in my parents' home outside Tel Aviv. The photographs in the album were from that dark time. They showed my father Yaacov Laskier's family, all of whom had been exterminated in the Holocaust. All I had known previously was that before the war, my father and his four brothers and four sisters belonged to a well-to-do, respected Jewish family.
(Photo - Laskier: Died in a Nazi concentration camp at age 14 / Family picture via Zahava Scherz)
In the album, there was a photo of a girl embracing a little boy. She was about 8 years old, with beautiful black, smooth hair. With a heavy heart, I turned to my father and asked him who those children were, and who was the girl who resembled me. And then, for the first time, my father told me about Rutka and Joachim-Henius, his children with his first wife, Dvorah Hampel. All three of them had perished in Auschwitz. Rutka was 14 when she died, exactly my age when I found out about her existence. Henius was 7 years old.
When I met Rutka
That is how I found out about my father's deceased children, and about his first life in Bedzin, a city in southwestern Poland where Jews had lived for centuries in peace until German troops arrived in September 1939. Four days after they occupied Bedzin, the Germans burned the town's historic synagogue to the ground, after locking some 200 Jews inside.
Six decades later, in 2006, my life was changed by an even more startling revelation, when the world and I learned that my half-sister Rutka had kept a diary during the war that had recently been made public. In these pages, I met Rutka for the first time: a very talented and beautiful girl, who, while being aware that she would not survive, wanted to document those days, in hopes future readers could follow her life and understand her death. When the diary was published, first in Poland and then in Israel, it was hailed for opening an illuminating new window into Jewish life during the Holocaust.
Although her notebook is far shorter, Rutka's prose, like Anne Frank's, transports readers directly into the experience of a persecuted adolescent living under the Nazi's occupation in a world that gets narrower and narrower until the bitter end. Its most gripping scene is Rutka's first-person account of a German Aktion in August 1942, in which the entire Jewish community of Bedzin was summoned to an outdoor stadium, then ruthlessly sorted into groups whose destinies were stark: a chance for life — or a death sentence to the nearby extermination complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most striking was the fact that Rutka clearly knew that Jewish adults, and even children, who were taken to the camp were being killed in the gas chambers.
The next generations
I recently visited an eighth-grade class in Bedzin, where students were studying Rutka's Notebook and conducting interdisciplinary projects "in the footsteps of Rutka Laskier." I listened to the students read paragraphs from my sister's diary and explain with love and compassion why they chose them. I will never forget this experience, which showed how meaningful her words can be for the young generation.
We must commemorate the lives of those lost to racial and political fanaticism — and not just on days like Holocaust Remembrance Day this Friday. We must not be afraid to remember, and more important, we must teach our children about the past. I applaud French President Nicolas Sarkozy's proposal to institute a nationwide Holocaust educational program. He is correct that ignorance could cause the repetition of this abominable event — whether it is rooted in anti-Semitism or any other hatred. All nations should follow France's lead and create new ways to remember the past and teach tolerance.
At a time when genocide remains a horrible reality in too many parts of the world, Rutka Laskier, Anne Frank and other Holocaust diarists remind us of the sanctity of each life that is taken in the mass crime that is genocide.
I feel confident that if my sister Rutka could have lived to speak to us today, she would encourage us never to forget the bitter fruits of racial and political fanaticism and to ensure that our children learn the same lesson. But then again, in a sense she still lives, and will always live to tell her story, in the moving pages of her notebook.
Zahava (Laskier) Scherz, Ph.D., is a faculty member of the Department of Science Teaching at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and the author of two essays in Rutka's Notebook: A Voice From the Holocaust.
Source: Zahava Scherz. A sister I never knew delivers an eternal Holocaust message. Blogs @USA Today (28 April 2008) [FullText and Comments]
Labels: Rehovot History, Rehovot Holocaust Stories
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