In death as in life, Simon Wiesenthal is described as “the conscience of the Holocaust.”
The unrelenting hunter of Nazi war criminals died Tuesday in Austria. He was 96.
His death foretells the loss, within a few decades, of all with direct links to the extermination of millions of Jews during World War II.
Wiesenthal’s death brings with it an urgency. There’s still time to listen to the stories of those who lived when millions died. They tell of their horrors so this terrible chapter won’t become lost in the pages of unopened history books.
“Simon Wiesenthal was the conscience of the Holocaust,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said last week. That torch is carried by all who survived the evil of Adolf Hitler and his followers.
Locally, the searing stories are told with the help of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center in Seattle.
Founded in 1988 by Holocaust survivor Henry Friedman, the nonprofit organization has a speakers bureau, provides educational materials for teachers and runs an essay contest.
“I try to remind my students before we have a speaker that these are very traumatic things they’re talking about. They’re going through it all again,” said Kari Averill, who teaches a Holocaust and human rights class at Cascade High School in Everett. “It’s very difficult, and they do it anyway.”
At Everett Community College, English instructor Joyce Walker hosts an annual speaker series as part of her “Surviving the Holocaust” course.
“The Holocaust is the central issue in modern European literature. It raises all the issues I think are important – what is goodness, what is evil, what it means to lead a good life. There is an abiding interest in the Holocaust,” Walker said.
Laurie Warshal Cohen of the Holocaust center in Seattle said its speakers have made about 250 presentations. Even when survivors are gone, she said, “we’ll have a number of second-generation children to tell their parents’ stories.”
Walker said one speaker, Holocaust survivor Noemi Ban, recounted how a student brought his baby to be photographed with her, knowing he was in the presence of singular history. “I want as many people as possible to hear these speakers,” Walker said.
It’s impossible to even begin narratives that could easily fill volumes.
Since joining the speakers bureau seven years ago, Fred Taucher, 72, of Everett has shared the pain of being captured as a boy in Berlin. He and his brother had been protected by a Nazi woman who had been their midwife at birth. She provided them with false ID papers.
But at 12, Taucher was arrested on a streetcar, stripped in public and eventually taken to Dachau, the camp and extermination center near Munich.
About 25 years ago, Taucher met Wiesenthal. “I had a very awful prejudice against Germans. He told me, ‘Son, do not blame the children for what their parents and grandparents did,’ ” Taucher said.
Friedman, 77, lives on Mercer Island and continues to share his story. For 18 months, in a part of Poland now in the Ukraine, he was hidden from the Nazis in a barn loft.
“I was with three other people. I could not stand up. All I could do was lie or sit,” said Friedman, who was 14 when the ordeal began.
Many years later, he brought the woman responsible for saving him to the United States. “They were good Christians,” he said.
He came from Brody, a town with about 15,000 Jews. “Fewer than 100 of us survived,” Friedman said.
He said he never spoke about the Holocaust to his wife or three children.
“I didn’t want to cause them pain,” he said. “But in the 1960s, my youngest son bought me a tape recorder. I started talking to a machine.”
Another speaker, 69-year-old Pete Metzelaar of Seattle, lost everyone in his family except his mother. Natives of Holland, the two of them hid on a farm. After a Nazi raid, the farmer dug them a cave. Fearful of discovery, they eventually moved to The Hague, where they scrubbed floors for two old women in exchange for a room.
When Metzelaar’s mother began to suspect the women would turn them in, she sewed a nurse’s uniform out of a sheet and passed herself off as a Red Cross nurse helping a boy orphaned by the war. Hitchhiking to what she said was an Amsterdam orphanage, they were picked up by SS officers. Metzelaar recalls the terror of sitting between them.
“Until 1992, I never spoke about it, it was such a psychological wrench,” he said.
He has since returned to The Netherlands. “My mom’s health was failing, and she could only remember the name of a dirt road. I found the road, I found the farm, and the cave was still the way we left it.”
Friedman said it’s gratifying to keep history alive, horrible though it is. “If I can make one person a better human being, my mission has been accomplished,” he said.
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
Holocaust center
The Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center promotes the study of the Holocaust in schools and communities. The center is at 2031 Third Ave. in Seattle. For information, call 206-441-5747 or go to www.wsherc.org.
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