Experiencing the Shoah
"What elective do I have?" I wondered as walked out of my seventh period class. Sophomores and juniors crowded around the list on the window of the library. As I strained to find my name among the others, my friend Bridget exclaimed, "Holocaust! Sarah, you and I have Holocaust!" She and I walked down the over crowded hallway to Dr. Kirkpatrick's room, 101. Ever since Dr. K announced that he would be offering a course on the holocaust, I had been interested in taking this elective. This subject had a special place in my heart because of two things. First, my Dad's whole family is Jewish, and secondly, I am active in the Pro-life cause and there are significant parallels between the holocaust and abortion, euthanasia, and the whole “culture of death”.
As I entered the classroom, commonly referred to as the 'Senior Lounge' because the seniors have most of their classes in this room, I felt out of place as a sophomore. The class consisted of four sophomores, two juniors, and ten seniors. There was an almost natural split in the way we sat in the room. The seniors seated themselves on the right and the underclassmen were on the left. Dr. K sat at a desk in the center of the room. The room smelled of beeswax candles and there were icons, posters, and a Japanese garment adorning the walls of the classroom. The room itself had a seminar feel to it, but it was also very relaxed, with its coffee maker and snacks on a table on the far wall. Dr. K said that the underclassmen could have coffee and tea like the seniors, since we were in the senior lounge, but none of us did because, to me at least, the seniors had earned it, we should wait until our senior year as well. I noticed that Dr. K interacted differently with our sophomore Western Civilization class than the way he talked with the seniors. He seemed more relaxed in the senior setting. He joked, told stories, and got on digressions more than with our class. This would be more natural of course because he has known the seniors two years longer than us. This was the dynamic of the classroom and continued to be for the semester.
During the first week of the elective, we discussed the Nazis and Hitler in general to understand the historical context for those who had not yet studied WWII. When we finally started to discuss the Einsatzgruppen in Lithuania and Ukraine, the Shoah really started to come alive for me. The Nazi soldiers would go into the villages and take the Jews into the woods, dig a trench, and shoot them until they fell dead into the trench. If that weren’t evil enough, the non-Jewish people would help round up and kill the Jews. They would even have picnics near the killing sites. My dad's family came from Lithuania, and fortunately, they left during the persecution of the Czars, which was prior to the Holocaust, otherwise, they would have been taken and killed and I would not be here today.
The next stepping-stone in my experience of the Holocaust was when we watched Lanzmann's Shoah. We watched four hours of the total nine, which consisted of interviews with perpetrators and survivors of the main death camps in Poland: Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. Many of the perpetrators of these camps told of how those in charge of the camps would trick the Jews. One Jewish prisoner told of a commander who stood on the roof of a building. He rallied the Jews together and called out, "We can find jobs for all of you! You there, what is your trade?" "I'm a tailor." "Excellent! And what about you?" "A nurse." "Very good, we need nurses in the infirmary! We need all of you to help, but first you must take showers to get rid of any lice that you have and to be disinfected." Come right through these doors. You'll need to remove all your clothing and jewelry before going in."
The people were all pushing and shoving to get in so they could get started in their jobs as soon as possible. Little did they know that they were being sent to an excruciating death. How can people kill others just because of their religion or in the name of "racial cleansing"? Why did they do it so deceptively? It reminded me of the lies that are told to pregnant women who are afraid and feel alone in their struggle. The same deceptive methods lead them to killing the child within them.
Many say that if they were in Germany during the Holocaust, they would stop it, but who stands up for the vulnerable in our society today? As we moved forward in our study of the Holocaust, I was determined more than ever to fight for the unborn and those who need a voice in our society.
The third big step in my experience was at Belzec. As we discussed the major death camps in Poland, this death center stuck out in my mind. It was here that more than 435,000 Jews were killed and methods of extermination were tested. There was one particular description that just pointed out the horror and intrinsic evil of the Holocaust. At Belzec, There were three options; if you were a strong young man, you were chosen to help with the camp in the Saundo Commando, burying the bodies, cutting hair, building new gas houses, and basically any of the dirty work the Nazi's didn't want to do. If you were just an average woman or man, you were driven along what the Nazi's horribly and ironically called, 'the road to the heavens'. If you were old, too young to walk very quickly, or sick, you were sent to the 'infirmary' right next to which was a deep burning trench. You would be shot in the head and thrown into the pit. The accounts of burning human bodies was horrendous. The Nazi's even discovered a way to stack the bodies so that they would burn faster. Supposedly, women burned better then men and old better than young. As the flames decimated these martyrs, it is said that pregnant women would pop. This was the horrible image that has stayed with me as a representation of the Shoah. After that class on Belzec, I was so saddened by it that, when I went outside for carpool, I took many deep breaths and thanked God that I was still alive.
At the beginning of the course, I was wavering in my commitment to the Pro-life movement. I thought to myself, “Why am I doing this? I don't have time to plan Processions. I'm no leader!" As the course came to its end, I realized that abortion is truly 'Treblinka in the womb', and I must do whatever I can to stop this genocide of innocent human life from conception to natural death. I decided not to be a spectator of history, saying, "If I were there, I would have stopped it." Rather, I decided that I would learn from the tragedy of the Holocaust and re-ignite my commitment to the battle for life.
“…Enable memory to play its necessary part in the process of shaping a future in which the unspeakable iniquity of the Shoah will never again be possible.”
~Pope John Paul the Great
