by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

April 30, 2009

Former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman urged Holocaust educators and Jewish community members to become active in the fight against injustice as an antidote to future acts of genocide.

She spoke April 24 as Raritan Valley Community College’s Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies wound up a three-day memorial for victims of the Shoa.

“We must be involved in our communities wherever we see things start to go astray,” said Whitman, who left the governorship in 2001 to become George W. Bush’s first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. “We mustn’t be afraid to speak out if we see people doing or encouraging bad things. We need always to be engaged because disengagement can lead to truly tragic occurrences.”

Whitman spoke at a luncheon at the North Branch campus honoring three New Jersey Holocaust survivors — Maude Dahme, Ursula Powell, and Tova Friedman.

“It is not easy going back over and over again over the worst periods of your life,” Whitman said, referring to the survivors. “It is not easy to remind yourself of people you lost and always face that question of ‘Why me? Why did I survive?’

“These are people who are determined that one of the missions they have is to take that message and bring it out and give and life and breath,” said Whitman, who now heads an environmental consulting firm. “It isn’t just something people read in a textbook. It isn’t possible that the naysayers say, ‘This didn’t happen.’

Added Whitman: “Those of us who survive and those of us who hear their message have to be their conscience. We have to be the ones who are constantly saying, ‘You don’t look the other way.’ Whenever we find things happening — however small — in our communities and our lives, we need to speak out.”

‘I needed to remember’

Following Whitman’s remarks, Paul Hirsch, president of the college’s board of trustees, discussed other acts of genocide that have occurred since the Nazi era.

After talking about the tragedies of Rwanda, Biafra, and Cambodia, Hirsch said, “If we don’t continue to be as horrified by those events as by Dachau, then we have become immunized to these daily occurrences. We must never forget that Darfur is every bit as horrible as Dachau.”

Tova Friedman, who was interned at Auschwitz when she was five years old, received the school’s “Make a Difference Award” in recognition of her role as a Holocaust educator.

She spoke of the numbers that were tattooed on her arm.

“The woman who gave me this, a prisoner herself, said, ‘I’ll make this very small. If you survive, it won’t be so noticeable.’”

When Friedman reached the United States seven year later, a doctor offered to remove the tattoo. “‘It will be easier to forget,’” he told her.

“I did not want to forget,” she said. “I needed to remember and to sound the alarm of how much human devastation and cruelty can be inflicted by hatred and prejudice.”

Ursula Pawel, who survived the camp at Theresienstadt, quoted a child’s poem hidden in a mattress and discovered after the camp in Czechoslovakia was liberated.

“Try to open up your heart to beauty and go to the woods some day and weave a wreath of memories there,” she recited. “Then, if the tears obscure your eyes, you know how good it is to be alive.”

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‘Important work’

STUDENTS FROM Somerset County schools heard from Holocaust survivors and their descendants at Raritan Valley Community College’s Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Some 600 middle-school students from Montgomery Township and 60 more from Somerset County Vocational and Technical High School in Bridgewater took part in the program on April 24.

Jon and Aryeh Kushner showed their young audience a video documentary of the visit their late grandmother, Rae Kushner, made to the village of Novogrodek, Poland, where she grew up. She lost most of her family in a Nazi slave labor camp.

She survived as a resistance fighter with the Bielski Brigade (recently the subject of the film Defiance) and is the namesake of the Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School in Livingston.

“They needed to liquidate this population of 6,000 Jews,” Jon Kushner told the students. “So every couple of months they would herd together 1,000 or 1,200 at a time and march them to a place not far away. They would have a mass grave prepared. Our great-grandmother was one of the first led to slaughter, which added to the terror of the people who remained alive.”

Asked by a history teacher about his view of Holocaust deniers, Aryeh Kushner said it was “very frustrating to think about and see wholesale denial…. What is even more disheartening is that you see this type of genocidal work being done today. It makes me feel it is almost an exercise in futility to do this work because posterity will ignore it. It seems to be something humans do: wipe out their counterparts.

“On the other hand,” he said, “it is important work.”

— ROBERT WIENER

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