HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR SHARES STORY
By Matthew DeLuca
The Heights , MA
Nov 1 2007
On the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, a handful of
top German officials questioned Adolf Hitler’s order to kill every
Polish man, woman, or child who came across their path. Hitler brushed
aside their complaints and referenced the genocide the Ottoman Empire
carried out in Armenia. "Who remembers the Armenians?" he asked them.
The issue of memory was critical on Tuesday night when Sonia Weitz,
Holocaust survivor and poet, spoke to Boston College students. In a
lecture titled "Standing Strong: I Promised I Would Tell," sponsored
by the Emerging Leader Program, Boston College Hillel, the Office of
the Dean for Student Development, and the Department of Jewish Studies,
Weitz shared both her own survivor story and her poetry.
Weitz had an easy, conversational way about her and a relaxed smile
that lit up the room. After stepping up to the podium and adjusting
her microphone, she smiled out at the audience and asked, "How about
those Red Sox? And how about those Eagles?" Of course, the subject
matter of her presentation was not as lighthearted.
Weitz played a 23-minute long video featuring herself that gave a
basic outline of her Holocaust experience. "As a survivor of the
Holocaust, I come from another world," she said. Weitz was a young
girl when the Germans invaded and occupied Poland. Her family was
rounded up and moved into the ghetto in Krakow. The elderly, ill, and
children under 14 were taken away from their families and moved out
of the ghetto. Weitz was under 14, but her parents were able obtain
forged papers that allowed her to stay with them. Of the people who
were taken away, Weitz said, "We did not know at the time that those
people were destined for death."
Many members of Weitz’s family were rounded up and shot at pointblank
range in the ghetto. At this point, Weitz had already begun to write
her poetry. On the night that her mother was put on a train, never to
be seen again, the little girl wrote a poem expressing her experience
in her diary. This transport was part of a huge movement of Jews out
of the ghetto to work at concentration camps across Europe. It also
happened to take place right after the Yom Kippur holiday. "We were
furious with God," Weitz said.
As Weitz was moved from camp to camp and horror to horror, she
continued to compose poetry. She rarely had anything to write with,
so she would most often memorize the lines as she composed in the
hope that she would be able to write them out for others someday.
At one point, Weitz and her sister were placed by chance in the same
camp as her father, though it was separated by gender. Weitz sneaked
to the men’s side and found her father, as she later addressed in
her poem "Victory." She writes of a boy in the barracks playing a
harmonica, whom she saw while in the men’s side. Weitz’s father said
that he had never gotten a chance to dance with her, and he took this
opportunity to do so. Her father died only a couple of weeks before
his camp was liberated.
Many of her other poems are about the horrors of life and death in
the camps. She wrote a poem describing the hanging of an old man and
a young boy, for example; the boy was hanged because he had sung a
Russian song. Though many of her poems deal with explicit horrors,
there are many that are testaments to the survival and endurance of the
human spirit. Weitz wrote a poem entitled "The Black Messiah" about her
liberation experience. Lying in the barracks, left delusional by hunger
and typhoid fever, she awoke to a black soldier in a U.S. military
uniform. She said, "I remember that I looked up and there was this
black American soldier … This soldier that I remember was totally
devastated." She was never able to find out who the man was.
Weitz also spoke of the difficulty of attempting to communicate her
experiences with other people. "Normal standards do not apply to the
Holocaust. It is unspeakable, it is unthinkable. It is a crime without
a language," she said. And yet, for years, she has been trying to
do exactly that: express the inexpressible. Weitz, like many other
Holocaust survivors, had to struggle with God and her faith before
she was able to come to any semblance of peace.
She laughed and said, "This is such a tough subject that if I didn’t
have a sense of humor I would have gone crazy long ago." She spoke
of how easy it would be to despair when there are Holocaust deniers
and historical revisionists all around the world while she can still
remember the very smell of Auschwitz, something she can never forget.
"Oh, my God," she said, "give me strength."
Weitz stressed how her mission in telling her story is to keep the
memory of the Holocaust alive, to keep people aware, so that another
disaster could be forestalled. She spoke of the genocide in Darfur
and the continued refusal of nations, including the United States, to
acknowledge the Armenian genocide. She spoke of the Jena Six incident,
and commented on the way in which the noose has seemingly supplanted
the burning cross as a symbol for hatred and racism.
Weitz looked out at the audience and spoke of the opportunities
available for action, urging active participation in the world’s issues
and insisting that no one be a bystander to atrocity. She spoke of
the failures of her own generation to do this and looked out to the
next generation, saying, "I think that, maybe, you will do better."
In an e-mail, Dwayne Carpenter, co-director of Jewish Studies,
commented on the importance of events of this nature. He said,
"Events such as these are extremely important for members of the BC
community in that they shake us from our lethargy, from our habit of
comfortably saying, ‘This couldn’t happen.’"