EVERETT – Noemi Ban can only tell her harrowing story once a day. It’s fitting that it be told today.
“It’s so important to me to go and tell the story,” said Ban, 82.
Ban’s story of surviving 19 months at Auschwitz and other World War II Nazi concentration camps memorializes her life-altering experience.
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Ban will speak at 7 tonight at Temple Beth Or, 3215 Lombard Ave., Everett.
“I am hoping when I finish with my talk, people will see what prejudice, bigotry and hate can do,” she said. “We have to take these things that happened there 60 years ago seriously.”
Ban said she was 19 when she was taken from Hungary to Auschwitz, where her mother, grandmother, 12-year-old sister and 20-month-old brother were killed in the gas chambers.
Ban said she spent 19 months in detention. After four months in Auschwitz, she was moved to a subcamp of Buchenwald called Allendorf, where she worked in a German munitions factory. She was freed during a death march from Buchenwald, she said.
“The only thing is, I can just tell the story once a day,” she said by phone from Bellingham. “I have to have a good night’s sleep before I can tell it again.”
The retired teacher tells her story almost daily around the state and country at schools and community meetings.
Ban said her story has a broad message: Be careful with labels. Learn there is always hope. Never give up.
“The experiences she had inspire different people in different ways,” said Rabbi Harley Karz-Wagman of Temple Beth Or. “They inspire people to fight prejudice, they inspire people to fight back when something bad is happening to them, they inspire people to go find something meaningful to do with their life.”
People fear Ban’s talks will be saddening and horrifying, but the resilience of the survivors is what people remember, Karz-Wagman said.
“That contact between survivor and listener is so special, so deep,” Ban said. “I can feel it as I talk.”
Tolerance isn’t enough anymore, diversity advocates say, and our culture needs to move toward respect and dignity.
“Right now we’re on an upswing toward tolerance, and past tolerance and toward respect, which is key,” Karz-Wagman said.
“I still hear the word tolerance, and teaching tolerance,” said Janet Pope, executive director of the Interfaith Alliance of Snohomish County, co-sponsor of Ban’s event. “Who wants to be tolerated? What we really want is to be respected and treated with dignity, which is what everybody wants.”
Fledgling multicultural festivals abound in Snohomish County, she said. Lynnwood has held them the past three years, including one last weekend, and this is the second year for one in Marysville.
“The basic premise is we have to learn to live with each other; there’s no choice,” Pope said. “The community is changing so much, and we can’t have our head in the sand.”
Reporter Jeff Switzer: 425-339-3452 or jswitzer@heraldnet.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
