Everett Community College students hear firsthand story of Holocaust

Published 10:48 pm Wednesday, April 16, 2008

EVERETT — Robert Herschkowitz dodged gunfire from Nazi planes, walked for three days from Belgium to France and survived life in a concentration camp — all before his sixth birthday.

Too young to retain many details of his ordeal, the experiences he endured during World War II have nonetheless shaped his life.

He lost family, made lifelong friends and gained a story that he tells year after year at Everett Community College.

Now 70, the engineer with Boeing in Everett has spent decades teaching Jewish history and lecturing on the anti-Semitism that nearly killed him.

“Why do I tell my story? One of my goals is to try to convince young people to work toward future history so it never happens again,” the Bellevue man told students Wednesday in the first of a series of lectures by Holocaust survivors at the college. “The Jews and everybody else killed in World War II by the Nazis were not as much killed by the Nazis as by the indifference of the rest of the world. A lot of people knew what was happening and nobody really did anything about it.”

Born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1938, Herschkowitz was just a toddler when Germany invaded his country on May 10, 1940. As Nazi planes zoomed overhead, dropping bombs and firing machine guns, he walked with his parents to France.

When the planes got too close, Herschkowitz’s parents would order him to lay on the ground. His mother would cover him with her body, then his father would lay on top of her, shielding his head with a suitcase.

They arrived in Marseille, a beach town in southern France, with no money. His mother sold her diamond engagement ring to buy forged papers that gave the family a new, non-Jewish identity.

When Vichy France soldiers marched through the streets, Herschkowitz saluted them. Influenced by anti-Semitic propaganda, he admired their berets.

“I was 4 years old and my dream was to join the SS,” said Herschkowitz, gazing at a photo of himself as a small boy — blond, smiling and standing on the beach ready to swim.

In 1942, Germans soldiers moved into southern France.

The first soldier who asked to see the family’s identity papers recognized them as false and threw them in the street.

The family was immediately sent to a concentration camp in Rivesaltes, France. Camp workers separated Herschkowitz’s father, a diamond dealer, from the rest of the family and sent him to work building dams.

Herschkowitz attended kindergarten in a concentration camp. Later in life, after being married for 10 years, he realized his wife was imprisoned at the same concentration camp. They attended kindergarten in the same school — and her mother was his teacher.

During a medical visit, camp doctors discovered Herschkowitz’s mother was pregnant. They banished her and her son from the concentration camp to a one-room stone hut in the tiny mountain community of Gras. There was no electricity, running water or food.

Herschkowitz helped feed his mother by taking care of goats for nearby farmers in exchange for bread, milk and cheese.

After Herschkowitz’s brother was born, his father escaped. His father tried to get his younger brother, Feibush Herschkowitz, to join him, but he declined. Feibush Herschkowitz was later transferred to the concentration camp in Auschwitz. He died in the gas chambers upon arrival.

After escaping, his father hid in the mountains of southern France until he befriended a pharmacist who took him in and nursed him to health. With the help of friends, Herschkowitz’s father eventually rescued his wife and children, probably by bribing or threatening the soldiers charged with guarding them.

The family hiked through the Alps and into Switzerland, where they lived until the war ended.

Around 50 students and teachers sat silently through Herschkowitz’s presentation. For many, he was their first direct link to the Holocaust.

Too young to know the pains of war personally, some students said Herschkowitz brought history to life.

Everett Community College math teacher Heather Cleveland recently read a book about the Holocaust, but had never heard a survivor speak until Wednesday.

“It was pretty amazing hearing a firsthand account,” she said as Herschkowitz walked out of the room and headed back to Boeing. “It makes it more real.”

Reporter Kaitlin Manry: 425-339-3292 or kmanry@heraldnet.com.

EvCC holocaust program

A program called “Eyewitness to History: Surviving the Holocaust Speakers” continues through May at Everett Community College.

People who lived through the Holocaust are scheduled to tell their stories as part of Everett Community College’s Humanities 150 class.

The presentations are open to the public and are from noon to 2 p.m. in EvCC’s Baker Hall, Room 120.

Speakers include:

April 30: Henry Friedman — With the aid of Ukrainian friends, a teenage Henry and his family hid from the Nazis for 18 months.

May 14: Peter Metzelaar — Placing their trust in the Dutch Underground, 8-year-old Peter and his mother were hidden on a small farm in the Netherlands, in a cave in the forest, and in a home in The Hague.

May 28: Noemi Ban — Unable to hide, Noemi was spared from the gas-chamber fate of her family, only to endure Auschwitz and a death march before being liberated.

For more information, call EvCC English instructor Joyce Walker at 425-388-9411.