Holocaust Survivor Event was a Wonderful Success!

The father of one of the core members of STAND is a writer, and he wrote this article for us to share with STAND and the media on the Holocaust Survivor event two weeks ago:

“Go Out and Save the World”

My family and I sat in a collection of old wooden chairs in the balcony of the Fly Creek United Methodist Church, from which we looked down at the stage below. There were no seats left downstairs in the pews, where rows and rows of people, though not necessarily parishioners, of most every age – elderly, middle-aged baby boomers like myself, college and thirty-somethings, and teens, more than I expected – sat awaiting the evening’s speaker. It was the last Friday in October, nigh on Halloween, and we had all come to hear Helen Sperling, Holocaust survivor, tell us her story. I looked around the balcony as more people came up the creaky, but solid, old staircase to where we sat. My seventeen-year-old daughter was there with her boyfriend and his sister, and classmates of theirs were nearby. A dear family friend and her son, whose Bar Mitzvah I had joyously attended, sat behind me, as did former and current high school students. It felt good to see so many young people here. I immediately recalled taking my son, now twenty and in college in New York, to hear another survivor speak a decade ago when he was only ten. A colleague had asked me then why I would take such a young boy to listen to a story of such graphic horror. I told her simply that soon there would be no more survivors for him to hear. And yet here was Helen Sperling telling her story as she has done annually for over thirty years at my alma mater, Colgate University, where her message has become part of the curriculum, and all over central New York.
The room began to quiet down as this little woman with a blanket on her lap was wheeled toward the stage and helped up the few stairs to the cavernous chair, maybe only so large in relation to her, which seemed to embrace her form and her presence. The crowd hushed as she was introduced by one of the leaders of STAND, the Cooperstown student group that had brought Mrs. Sperling to Fly Creek tonight. The acronym is for “Students Taking Action Now, Darfur,” and in her introduction, high school student Jesse Shelton explained that the purpose of the group was to heighten awareness of genocide going on all over the world, particularly in Sudan, and that the proceeds gathered tonight would go directly to that work. It was Shelton and fellow STAND leader Anna Kramer, who were most instrumental in producing the event.
“Hello, my name is Helen Sperling. I am a Jew and a survivor of the Holocaust.” Thus began her story of pain and nightmare and human dignity and hope. Sperling began by telling us a little bit about herself as a little girl. “I was born in 1920,” here she interrupted herself. “I’m ninety. You can stop doing the arithmetic.” Frequently she peppered her presentation with humor. She characterized herself as being “very well loved, very spoiled, very independent.” As she continued to describe her childhood in a small town in Poland, she told the audience that it was important to know the history of the time. “We knew what was going on in the world, but we didn’t want to believe, to see the truth.” She reminded us of Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch, or revolt, in Munich in 1923 which sent him to prison where he wrote the two volumes of Mein Kampf, or, as she called it, My Hate. (It actually translates to My Struggle in English.) Sperling castigated the people of Poland and Germany for ignoring the warnings contained in Hitler’s thesis of anti-Semitism and his theory that “one cannot be both a German and a Jew.” But the Jews in Poland were not paying attention when Hitler came to power in Germany.
“Not even after we heard what was happening to the Jews in Germany did we think it would come to us. He was a strange little man with a funny mustache. We thought he would disappear. In 1939 when the Germans walked into my little hometown, we realized it was here.”
Then Sperling paused before relating a vivid and haunting memory of three young German soldiers coming to her house to search for valuables. She told of the humiliation and violation she felt when the Germans rifled through her mother’s special Sabbath linens. “Then one of then sat in my father’s chair. My father had his special chair that was just for him and none of us ever sat there. But one of them sat in his chair, and thrust his boots near my mother’s face, threw our fine linens at her and yelled, ‘Polish them!’ And as she did it, I didn’t ask why and I didn’t say no. That was the beginning of six years of helplessness, humiliation and degradation.” And when they were forced out of their house, the home her father, an architect, had built with his own hands, they remained strong. “We did not cry.” It was only later, when they found out that her father’s prized lilac trees were dug up and sent to Germany did her father break down. “That was the first time I saw my father cry.”
She recounted the gathering of Jews and the “relocation of human beings as though they were cattle.” Here she pointed to the “clever euphemisms the Germans used for what they did to us.” She related the story of the night she snuck out of the ghetto to continue a tradition of calling her best friend on the Christian girl’s birthday.
“I was so proud I had made it. I called her house and said, ‘It’s me. You didn’t think I forgot your birthday?’ The voice on the other end said, ‘You dirty Jew, How dare you call?’ My soul was never the same.”
She stopped and grew quiet. “If I tell you that six million died in the Holocaust, what does that mean? It doesn’t really mean that much. It’s just a six and six zeros. It’s a number.” Then she reached to the small table to her right and, ever so gently, picked up two antique photos to show the audience. “These are my parents,” she continued in a voice that trembled with sadness and loss. “This is all I have left of them. You must remember that every one of the six million had a human face. They are not a number. They are mine.” An involuntary gasp escaped my lips and my eyes welled over with tears. But not for the first time.
Sperling then told us of the horror of being separated from her family; the horror of the transition camps where they were broken and treated like dogs; the horror of arriving at the labor camps, where they read on the gates, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” Work Will Make you Free; and the horror of seeing the prisoners who were already there when they arrived, who were emaciated and bald and dirty. and thinking to herself “I cannot look like that.” She told us of how, months later, standing out in the rain and seeing her reflection, she realized that she did look like that, “I was that ugly. Not only did the Germans look on us like we were subhuman, we looked upon ourselves that way.”
And she spoke of the piles of clothing and one pen, “a cage, really,” overflowing with the stuffed animals of children she knew had been murdered. She told us of the random beatings, the infractions that would get Jews killed, and the shootings of innocent Jews as though the German soldiers did it for sport. And she told us of the shower rooms that weren’t showers at all, and of the ovens, and of the stench of burning human flesh that enveloped the countryside around the camps so that no one could have doubted what grisly murders were taking place. And as she spoke, I stole glances of the faces of those around me, particularly the students, and saw the impact in their eyes. The chairs were not comfortable, but there was neither sound nor movement and the only interruption to their rapt attention was when they grimaced or when a shudder shook the body of a teenage girl behind me. Helen Sperling had spoken for over an hour, but we didn’t realize that time had passed. She asked if we wanted to “take a break,” but we all just adjusted ourselves in our seats and she went on, almost apologizing for the length of her recollection and promising that “we won’t be here until midnight.”
This remarkably tenacious woman went on with her story of the unbelievable nightmare of the death camps, but now she also spoke of moments of hope and human kindness. She described how her block supervisor, a horrible woman, a prostitute who would pick prisoners at random and beat them each night for no reason, smuggled her paper and pencil so Helen could write what she jokingly called her “very bad poetry.” She recalled with obvious pride still in her eyes how she and others would sabotage shells that they were forced to make in the munitions factory, and how she would imagine them exploding still inside the German artillery. And she recounted how other female prisoners hid her behind them when they lined up to be “counted” each morning, because Helen was bleeding from a beating the night before. To bleed on white snow was enough to have a Jew killed in the German work camps. She told of the agony of the death march from Buchenwald, where she was interred after Ravensbruck; how the Germans asked if there were any too weak or tired to walk, and then machine-gunned those who had replied. “How could they have separated themselves? Didn’t they know what would happen? Had they just given up hope?”
“Then one day we heard planes overhead, and they were not the sound we had heard before and the Germans heard them and they were scared. For the first time we saw fear in their faces, just as they had always seen fear on ours. The Americans had come and we knew there was hope.”
Helen Sperling was liberated in April of 1945, only to spend three years recovering in a hospital before being coming to the United States with her little brother, with whom she had miraculously been reunited. She met and married a man who had also survived the camps. Again speaking with a shaking voice, she told us, “I knew I could only marry another survivor. I knew I could never marry someone who could not understand what made me cry out in bed at night. During the day, the days, they are now mine, but the nights are still Hitler’s.”
Someone nearby gasped, “Oh God,” and it punctuated the silence as I was reminded of a question from my own youth. Growing up in northern New York in the decade following WWII, I never understood why my parents’ friends were all Jews. As I got older, in the 60s, when I began to challenge everything, especially my parents and my religion, I even started to resent this self-created ghetto they and the other Jews of my hometown seemed to have built around themselves. Then, following my junior year in high school, I went to Peru on a foreign exchange program. Unknown to me, and unrequested, I was put with a Jewish family. The parents had both fled Europe in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power and his persecution of the Jews and had found each other there in a country without the quotas that kept Jews from coming to America. It was from them I learned what Jews all over the world had learned during the war; why my parents’ closest friends were all Jews; a lesson Helen Sperling taught her audience tonight. “In Germany, in Poland, Jews were Germans and Poles first, and Jews second. In America we became Jews first.” It was about trust and fear and identity and realizing that the unbelievable had happened. To help us understand she related a terribly sad, though not surprising, story of the day that her seven-year-old daughter came home from school crying because a classmate had called her a “dirty Jew.” That was the day my whole beautiful American life collapsed.” I had heard that same hate-filled barb myself both as a youth, and as an adult, and could only shake my head at the story’s punch line. After a long breath, she went on in a stronger, insistent voice,
“I survived and I didn't survive for nothing. So I talk, and I talk and I share. The important thing is not only the people who killed, but also the people who did nothing. The bystanders. I want you not to be bystanders; don't let anyone tell you you're helpless. It's so important, so very important. The issue is whether we have learned the lesson, and I am afraid we have not learned the lesson. Genocide continues to occur in our world; Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur, where you want to save. We have not learned our lesson. But you have learned it. You must learn it. Now go save the world."
Sperling concluded with a Hasidic story I knew from my youth. It tells of the tzaddikim, the thirty-six hidden righteous men upon whose shoulders lies the hope of the world. Because we do not know who they are, they could be anybody, and she pointed to members of the crowd, first to students sitting on the floor in front of her like toddlers listening to their grandmother tell a story, just like that, then to others. “You could be one,” she chirps, “or you, or you,” and she repeated her challenge to all, but I know it was to the teenagers who had come to learn, “Go. Go and save the world because it needs saving.”
And then she was done, as softly and graciously and solemnly as she had begun. Before the applause, the standing ovation, there was a significant and perceptible silence; truly the greatest tribute possible. Gradually, it seemed, the crowd rose, as much in gratitude as acknowledgement. No one left, despite it being over two hours since this little lady had begun to share her life with us. We all simply applauded. And some of us cried. Finally, Anna Kramer gathered our attention and explained that, because it was “Shabbat,” the Jewish Sabbath, we would all take part in the Hebrew custom of Kiddush, blessing the wine and bread. She introduced Dr. Richard Sternberg, who explained the ritual and then recited the blessings in both Hebrew and English. I realized, sadly, that I missed this most holy of Jewish rituals as I watched Helen Sperling raise her arms in invitation. “Now, come give me a hug.”
I turned to the young people behind me and thanked them and praised them for making the decision to come hear Helen Sperling. I was especially touched to see a girl in her early twenties whom I had known when she was a student. She was no longer in school, it wasn’t an assignment, she was not part of STAND nor was she studying this shameful chapter in the world’s history. She had just come to be a witness.
At the bottom of the stairs we were caught by a bottleneck in the tiny lobby of the church. The members of STAND had prepared an “Oneg Shabbat,” traditionally a small collation for congregants following the Friday night service. I pushed ahead, ever so slowly, toward the entry to the parish hall. It was then that I was struck by the length of the line to hug Mrs. Sperling. As I inched forward, watching as adults and children, my friends and people I didn’t even recognize, waited to greet this wonderful woman who has made her life’s work the education of generations, I realized just how long this line really was. It stretched well past me, and past those who waited behind me. It stretched literally, but more important, figuratively, to the students, the teenagers who came together in their club, their organization, their movement – their hearts – and not only brought Helen Sperling to us, but brought their neighbors and friends and classmates to her. The teenagers whose purpose for this part of their lives, is to do what they can to stop genocide wherever it ravages humanity. This line extends from her, through all of us to that generation that is here following ours, and it extends to all the generations that will follow them. Our generation did not fix things, as so many of us thought we would. But that line tells us not to give up hope that one generation may someday do what we could not. This line also reaches to the thousands and thousands of young and old who have come to hear Helen Sperling and had their lives made better. And it returns to Helen who implored us to “save the world,” not just by bearing witness, but by taking action for the sake of all those in peril, just as the members of STAND did this Sabbath evening before Halloween. It is natural to ask the question, “How can one person save the world?” The diminutive woman in the big chair at the head of the long line has given us the answer.

David Pearlman
Cooperstown NY
11/11/10