A ceremony in the Memorial Chapel Wednesday was an early observance of the Holocaust Rembrance, officially on May 5. The ceremony including a visual display, an a capella performance and a lecture by Holocaust survivor Henny Rosenbaum Markiewicz Simon.
Simon, wearing a blue-green suit with a yellow Jude button on her lapel, spoke about her experiences in Germany from 1933 to 1945, including her time in a concentration camp and her liberation from the camp.
Her narrative took the audience through tragic moments, like being thwarted from escaping to China six days before departure because of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Simon also spoke about more fortunate experiences, like the kindness of German soldiers who would leave food in their pockets for the Jews in the ghetto who washed their clothes.
Simon repeatedly stressed the difference between Germans and Nazis. She explained that to hate an entire nationality would be to lower herself to her former captors’ level. Sadly, she saod, the world has not learned that lesson.
“Hate corrupts us and blinds us,” Simon said. “To me, the only answer is education. Learn from each other.” She urged the audience to fight against contemporary forms of hatred.
After her talk, students had the opportunity to speak with Simon and look at a table of mementos she had kept from her youth. On the table were pictures of Simon as a girl before the war, a tall lanky girl with thick long braids. Next to them were pages and pages of names of Jews living in the same ghetto as Simon, as well as the last postcard Simon had received from her mother before she learned of her mother’s death at the hands of the Nazis.
Simon’s talk was followed by an a capella performance by The New Group. The group sang an English translation of a poem about the ghetto and a song in Yiddish written just before the start of the Holocaust.
“The importance of remembering the past is to fight all injustices today, to recognize that genocides are happening all over and we must work to stop them,”said Julie Ach ’08.
The ceremony continued in the same vein. Students lit Yarzheit candles, traditional Jewish memorial candles: 11 for the 11 million people killed in the Holocaust and 12 for all other genocides. Each candle was dedicated to a different persecuted group, including homosexuals, gypsies, and black Germans.
After the candle lighting Alex Salzberg ’07 read the Kaddish aloud, which is a Jewish prayer for the dead, in which lines of the prayer were interspersed with the names of concentration camps.
“[Simon’s] culminating message was to never forget, which speaks to the importance of a ceremony like this one,” said Rebecca Bak ’05.
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