Holocaust Commemoration, 1996

Holocaust Commemoration, 1996

Holocaust Commemoration, 1996

Precisely two years ago, through a combination of circumstances, I was drawn to Warsaw, Poland, where I attended the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and, nearby, the 50th anniversary of the Treblinka uprising.

There is little to see with one's eyes at these places, since the Nazis, soon before the end of their terror, tried in vain to erase, through mass destruction, all traces of their inhumanity. But there is much to see with one's heart and mind, and while at Treblinka I listened to one of the few living survivors of this infamous death camp describe his existence there.

One needs to hear the story of only one witness to understand why we must remember, why we must never forget, why we must come together on Yom Hashoah, and why we must say "never again." We must never forget that six million Jews' and millions of gypsies, political dissidents, homosexuals, and others were sent to the concentration and death camps for reasons related to nothing more than personal characteristics--their coloring, their religion, their beliefs, their sexual orientation, or geographical happenstance.

Thankfully, there are thousands of witnesses the worldover--and, for those of us in my generation, tens of thousands of children of witnesses who must never forget. This is why, at Treblinka--the death camp where hundreds of thousands of Jews were tortured and murdered--I felt compelled to stand for a time in one of the railroad cars that delivered the Jews to their final destination in the final solution.

This is why I have taken that train ride to Dachau to see the barracks, the barbed wire, the photographs, and the names--those lists of names, lists of names, list of names, under "S" listing Spanier over and over again.

This is why I have stood on the ground where Lidice once existed, trying to fathom what could compel a people to completely, literally, wipe a community off the map by killing all its inhabitants and burning everything to the ground.

This is why I have been to the edge of the ravine at Babi Yar, in the now suburbs of Kiev, where tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of Jews were systematically and brutally murdered and left to be forgotten in perhaps in the world's most infamous site of mass murder.

This is why, in that nearly forgotten town of Katyn, near Minsk in Belarus, where one-fourth of that country's entire Jewish population was eliminated, I have touched the stones that were once the foundations of homes and closed my eyes to imagine first the peaceful rural life of the Jewish community there, and then to imagine the horror they experienced when the command was given to obliterate all the men, all the women, all the children, all the old, and all the young.

This is why, in the rural northwest corner of what was then known as Czechoslovakia, I continued my quest to understand this challenge, traveling to the town of Terezin, named Terezinstadt by the Germans. There is a ghastly story there, extremely well preserved. As I found my way around this town, once the home of 3,000 peaceful citizens, later converted to a concentration site for more than 180,000, I struggled again to understand how the world could have allowed the holocaust to happen in the face of increasingly compelling information that it was unfolding.

There were unspeakable crimes in the 35,000-prisoner concentration camp know as the Little Fortress, in the efficient crematoria of Terezin where thousands perished, and in the town which became a collecting point for tens of thousands of Jews who died at Auschwitz.

As it turns out, it was only last year, through an amazing set of circumstances related to my speaking publicly about the holocaust, that I learned I had a living cousin who I had never know about before. She was smuggled out of Germany in a railroad car to Lisbon with 11 other children, then put on a ship to New York, then on a railroad car to Omaha, Nebraska. Now living in Oakland at the age of 69, she has been able to tell me much of what really happened to my family. I now know that my relatives ended up mostly in Terezinstadt and Stuthoff.

It was a period in world history when some individuals, when some nations. had the chance to look ahead and make a difference, but for a time did not. Certainly the answers are rarely easy. But even when the answers are elusive the questions must raised.

Are the fundamental questions really any different today? Are we not still confronted each day with issues of equity, justice, compassion, sensitivity, tolerance, and understanding? These are the values that govern many of my own priorities, many of my own decisions, and many of my own choices, yet I still struggle each and every day to understand why so many around us fail to understand why fundamental human rights--whether defined by the constitution, by Judeo-Christian morality, or simply by common decency--should be so elusive, so foreign, so feared.

Have we forgotten already? Or have we failed to learn in the first place?

One needn't go to Europe time and time again as I have to find evidence of atrocities. The world knows only too many examples today, in their contemporary variations. There are, in varying degrees, too many examples of violence, fear, and hatred. Why must we address such issues in our homes, in our community, in our schools, and yes, in our university? Because as others have pointed out before us...

Violence springs from hatred

Hatred springs from fear

Fear springs from ignorance

Ignorance can only be combated by education

And, thus, education is the solution

As Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League has pointed out, "there are no halfway measures against bigotry, hatred and anti-Semitism." It has to be rejected totally. And so must we reject totally the kind of thinking that discriminates against any individual or group of people because of their God-given characteristics.

Now, if I may, let me tell you a story. The invitation for me to speak tonight was prompted in part by an essay I wrote based on a profound personal experience. I wrote this essay, which has been published in the Prairie Schooner, in the minutes after a taxi ride to a hotel in Richmond, Virginia. I checked into the hotel and requested that they immediately send a typewriter to my room. Ironically, I was in Richmond to attend a meeting of the Christian Children's Fund. I say ironically because I was a Jew serving as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the world's largest child development organization, and one of the world's largest charities, elected by 20 devoted Christian clergymen and laypersons.

Since writing this story, I have tried--for some reason unsuccessfully, to read it aloud. As good fortune would have it, and given that I am, after all, president of a university with a vast reservoir of talent and goodwill, I was able to seek assistance from our Department of Theatre Arts. I had earlier met a fascinating, talented, and engaging young actress who it occurred to me could read you the story that I could not. Cynthia Baldessare grew up in Mobile, Alabama, one of four children raised solely by her mother in the most basic of economic circumstances. She went on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, went on tour with the production of Faith Journey, the story of Martin Luther King, Jr's life, where she played Coretta Scott King. She played a vampire in a movie, was a cheerleader, a dancer, and did theatre in Europe before graduating from Troy State University in Alabama. She now teaches Theatre 102 at Penn State while she works on her graduate degree. Thank you, Cynthia, for reading my story, and thank you all for letting me share it with you.

Coincidence and Injustice

by Graham B. Spanier

I know very little about my roots. My father died four years ago and told me next to nothing. He never wanted to talk about the war, or for that matter what had preceded it, I suppose because it was all so painful for him.

After slipping out of Hitler's Germany in 1936 as a 15 year old, he never saw most of his family again. With a few Deutsche marks sewn secretly into his collar by his mother, but with no other possessions, he managed to escape the oppression of his land of birth and gain entry to South Africa. He was sponsored by a farsighted woman who provided young Jewish boys with a temporary home outside of the fascist state. In the years that followed, twenty of his close relatives died in the death camps.

His father, the owner of a prosperous cigar industry, died of a broken heart, they say, after escaping in 1941 to Holland, parking his car at the border and fleeing with his wife and younger son across a farm field. They then found their way to England, then to the United States. My grandfather, a prominent citizen and a German soldier in the first World War, lost everything - -his business, his family, and his homeland.

He never saw his son again, because my father didn't reach the U.S. until later.

On a Piedmont flight to a meeting in Richmond, I was engrossed in a little book that was trying to explain to me why the Jews came to be so hated that the German populace could have been motivated to participate in the Holocaust. The long history of discrimination dating back centuries, the defeat in World War I, the economic problems of the 1920's, the global impact of the stock market crash, and the need for a scapegoat all played a part, the book said.

Like other post-war babies with similar roots, I've struggled to understand. I have what some would consider an unhealthy obsession, forcing myself to revisit the horrors of the holocaust through books, movies, lectures, and discussion; I have visited the sites of the atrocities. I think I have a survivor's guilt even though I really didn't survive anything.

Then the coincidence. The kind you see in movies. Joining me in the taxi from the airport to the hotel was a young couple with hints of an accent. The taxi driver immediately ascertained that they were from West Germany, here to visit Philip Morris, the tobacco manufacturer. Then they would take an extended vacation. Being friendly, as people are to strangers in taxis, I asked where in West Germany they were from. They described the general area near Hamburg.

I asked if they knew of a small town named Bunde, thinking quietly to myself about this horrid little place where my father's uncle Willie had been hanged in a storefront window and set afire. Why yes, they lived there! Incredible, I thought, someone from the small town where my family lived for generations.

"My family is from Bunde," I said. "Is there by any chance a cigar factory that is still there?"

"Yes," he exclaimed with amazement, "it is our factory!"

I'm not a terribly emotional person, but I experienced in the span of a few moments more emotions than I knew were possible to feel in so short a time. I was stunned by the coincidence, incredibly excited by the opportunity to be able to find answers to a hundred questions that clamored in my mind. I also experienced horror thinking that I was inches away from the person who inherited from his grandfather the very house and business that Hitler had taken from my grandfather.

I suffered a silent rage as I contrasted the affluence of this young couple, who I learned were on a 10-city vacation-of-a-lifetime first-class tour of the U.S., with the poverty my father inherited, and I experienced, spending my first eight years in a working class neighborhood of immigrants on the South Side of Chicago. My father died an unhappy man, never seeming to transcend the reality of his lot, always aspiring to the affluence he might have had but never did.

This young man in the taxi was friendly enough, and I reminded myself that he, too, was a post-war baby. It was not his fault that he owned my family's factory, I reasoned charitably.

"My grandfather built that factory," I said with a mixture of revelation and tact. "His name was Gustav Spanier. He left there in 1941."

"I know the name! Yes, I know that he was the founder."

He was now a sticky kind of pale, and I felt the very same way. I learned that the factory came to his family immediately after my grandfather was forced to leave it. I learned that it employs 1500 people, and is still the major employer in the region. I wanted to know if his grandfather were still alive, but didn't ask. I'm not usually that polite; I am unsure if my reluctance was related to a fear of knowing or just an interest in avoiding the discomfort for both of us.

I knew he sensed the awkwardness of the moment when I asked if I might have his name and address. He was noticeably reluctant and said he had no business card. I did force that one issue because I wanted to know. I got his name and address and gave him mine. The factory now was known by his family's name: Andre.

As the cab arrived at the hotel, I had asked only ten or twelve of my hundred questions. I wanted to know so much more. What did he personally know of the circumstances leading to his family's acquisition of the company? What was his grandfather's connection to the Nazis? How did he feel about this twisted injustice?

It was a generously long cab ride because the driver, sensing the moment I suppose, somehow understood I needed that time. But as we approached my hotel stop, the taxi was curiously silent. I was ready to cry but wouldn't allow this to happen in the taxi. That would come later. My coincidental companions were surely ready for my exit, having been gracious in the face of what could only have been discomfort.

My parting comments allowed for the possibility that I might someday visit, and their words were most encouraging. I know I will never hear from these folks again. I now must struggle with the question of whether they will hear again from me.