by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

March 3, 2009

A day after their Feb. 16 pilgrimage to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, some 70 teenagers from Middlesex County heard a Holocaust survivor say, “We are counting on you — what you can do today and what you can do in the future to make this a better world.”

The young people — Catholics, Protestants, and Jews ranging in age from 14 to 18 — visited the museum, then the nearby Lincoln and Vietnam War memorials, on a trip sponsored for the fourth consecutive year by the Daniel Pearl Education Center of Temple B’nai Shalom in East Brunswick.

The students came from Saint Bartholomew School in East Brunswick and the Reformed Church of Highland Park, as well as the religious school at B’nai Shalom.

An evening later, they gathered at the Reform synagogue to hear Judith Sherman, a resident of Concordia in Monroe who lost much of her family in the Shoa even as she lived through imprisonment at a concentration camp in Germany.

Looking out at a semicircle of audience members in the temple’s social hall, Sherman told the group that when she is invited to speak of her experiences, “my reaction is always ‘no’ but I always say ‘yes.’ After many years of silence as a survivor, I feel that I do have to bear witness, and so I will. I have no choice but to do so,” she said.

Sherman is the author of Say the Name: A Survivor’s Tale in Poetry and Prose.

“Anti-Semitism and genocide continue, and we adults are not doing such a good job in this world in preventing these things from happening,” she said.

Describing her bucolic life as a child in a small Czech village before the Nazis came, Sherman spoke of playing on the family farm with horses, swimming in the river, and enjoying the flowers in the meadow, the chickens and ducks in the back of her house, and “that place by the trees where when you were glad and when you were sad, after awhile you would wait for a smile…. I may be romanticizing it, but those are the memories of my early years,” she said.

“And then, terror,” as she awoke one night at the age of 10 to see a soldier pointing his bayonet at her head.

‘You all are witnesses’

Sherman said her family “was determined that some of us, all of us — somehow we would survive.” Separated from their parents, Sherman, her eight-year-old brother, and her six-year-old sister smuggled themselves into Hungary and wound up in an internment camp in Budapest.

She remembered crying because she did not have a toothbrush. “A toothbrush starts your day and ends your day,” she said.

Several months later, imprisoned in Ravensbruck, “a toothbrush did not seem like a necessity. It was like an ultimate luxury. And every time a new woman was brought into my barracks, I would ask whether she still remembers the taste of peppermint toothpaste.”

She recalled the day her brother was shipped off to his death in Auschwitz. “My memory of him is always as a nine-year-old,” she said.

Sherman said she was saved by “my miracle.” When she arrived at Auschwitz, the death camp was too overcrowded that day “because they were gassing 10,000 Jews a day and didn’t have room for us.”

After a year in Ravensbruck, she was ordered on a death march, and although most of her fellow prisoners did not survive, she lived to be liberated by Russian troops.

Asked about coping with her past, Sherman said, “We survivors live on two tracks. I always live here and I always live there. Time doesn’t diminish that. So, when I have a shower in the morning, I automatically think of Auschwitz. When I have bread, I think of when I didn’t have it. Almost everything that happens in my life I connect to the Holocaust, and I think that is true of a lot of people.”

Following Sherman, Rep. Albio Sires (D-Dist. 13) lectured his predominantly teenage audience on the importance of racial and ethnic tolerance.

Speaking as a Cuban immigrant who grew up in the multicultural environment of West New York, the congressman said, “I was called a ‘spic.’ I was not allowed to play basketball on the court owned by the town. Luckily I was tall and I was big and I was able to mix and play sports. But at first it was very difficult, because of people’s ignorance in not knowing, they try to reject you.

“You should just take a person for what they are, how they treat you, and do not characterize them. I lived with that lesson all my life.”

He told the young people, “You have a difficult task. You are facing a world today where there are hatreds, there are wars, there are people with very little tolerance. You have to make a lot of decisions as you grow. But just remember that not everybody is bad. I had a lot of good people in my life.”

The Rev. Patty Fox led a delegation of Protestants from the Reformed Church of Highland Park, where she is assistant pastor, to the museum. In addition to 12 teenagers from her congregation, Fox brought along her nine-year-old daughter, Maya.

“Maya has been reading children’s level books about the Holocaust in school and has been interested in it herself,” the minister told NJ Jewish News. “She asked if she could go, and it is very important to me that her interest is taken seriously.”

Fox shielded her daughter from “some of the images, particularly the movies of Jews being moved into mass graves and treated like they were not humans.” Three days after their visit, she said “it was a very moving experience” for her and her child, as well as the teenagers she chaperoned. “There was a lot of emotional reaction to what they saw, and they talked a lot about the fact that such atrocities continue to happen.”

David Litt, a trustee of the Pearl Center who moderated the evening, ended the gathering with a quote from Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize-winning author who endured imprisonment at several concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

“We are an endangered species,” Wiesel wrote of himself and his fellow survivors. “Someday there will be just one left. I don’t want to be that person. It is too heavy a burden to have the last word, the last memory. But I tell myself and my students that whoever reads or listens to a witness becomes a witness.”

Then Litt turned to his audience.

“You all now have the responsibility, the burden, the obligation,” he told them. “You all are witnesses. You need to tell this story forward.”

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