Chaim Singer-Frankes looks on
as Jack Pinto, a concentration camp survivor,
delivers his videotaped testimony.
Chaim Singer-Frankes was 12 years old when, lying across his
father's lap as they watched a movie, he realized an awful
truth about the Holocaust.
"His lap began to shake," said Chaim, recalling how his
innocence fell away as he witnessed his father's grief and
understood he was somehow linked by horrifying personal
experience to the events displayed on the television screen.
Suddenly he understood snatches of overheard conversa-tion,
when his father, Samuel Singer, had said, "My arms were
dripping in blood..." and "I ran through the snow naked..."
Years later, his life's work at the Survivors of the Shoah
Visual History Foundation is dedicated to the preservation
of the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other
witnesses. Chaim was guest speaker for the second annual
Laddie H. Lollar Human Rights Symposium held April 4 at
Bethel College.
The symposium honors the long and distinguished teaching
career of Bethel College Professor of Psychology, Dr. Laddie
Lollar. Lollar began his teaching career over 50 years ago
and is the long-time advisor of Phi Delta Sigma Fraternity.
He is a member of approximately 20 human rights and
environmental groups.
Chaim's father's videotaped testimony of survival in
concentration camps in his native Poland, as well as
Austria, was larger than life as, with heart-rending
emotion, he recalled experiences too terrible to contemplate
among civilized societies. His message joins some 52,000
others gathered by the foundation, giving lasting voice to
survivors and witnesses from 56 countries and in 32
languages.
Six million Jews did not survive to tell their stories.
And Chaim is still unsure how he will explain to his
two-year-old daughter, Adinah, the shocking realities of
history, for in truth, the Holocaust was the awful trough
amid centuries of anti-Semitism that had resulted, beginning
in the sixth century, in the Diaspora; the scattering of
Jews across the face of the earth, albeit to the benefit of
their adopted countries.
To single out just one measure of accomplishment, Jewish
laureates have claimed 19 percent of Nobel Prize awards
since 1901: 48 in biomedical sciences, 26 in chemistry, 19
in economics, 43 in physics, and 11 in literature. Their
countries of birth were: one each from Venezuela, the Czech
Republic, Argentina, Lithuania, Azerbaijan, the United
Kingdom, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, and
Algeria; two from South Africa, Ukraine, and Israel; four
from France and Canada; five from Italy; seven from Poland
and Hungary; eight from Austria; 13 from Russia; 18 from
Germany, and 65 from the United States.
The United States has indeed benefited from its belated
rescue of the Jews and, in fact, of Europe, for Hitler's
hysterical swathe of oppression had consumed the continent.
Chaim Singer-Frankes addresses the
audience of the second annual Laddie H. Lollar Human
Rights Symposium.
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It was 1941 before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, forcing the
United States into World War II, that had long been underway
in Europe as Hitler systematically waged his campaign to
obliterate unwanted races and peoples and gain more living
space for the Aryan race. It would take three and a half
more years to defeat the Axis powers in Europe and several
months more to war's end with the dropping of the atomic
bombs in Japan.
Following the 1925 publication of Mein Kampf, in which he
outlined his plans to eradicate Judaism as well as
Communism, Hitler in 1933 was appointed chancellor of
Germany and the same year obtained dictatorial powers over
the country. He wasted little time; in fact, Dachau--the
first Nazi concentration camp--opened the same year in which
he became dictator. By the end of the decade, hundreds of
camps had been constructed in Germany, Czechoslovakia,
Austria, Poland, Holland and France.
Some of the camps were specifically geared toward
extermination of human beings deprived of that status by
virtue of being Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses,
political prisoners, aid providers and others. In keeping
with the efficiency that marked the regime, the remains were
disposed of in a calculated process in crematoria specially
constructed for the burning of human bodies.
Auschwitz, in Poland, was the most notorious of these
killing factories. Over 20,000 people could be killed and
cremated each day. Before burning the bodies, however, their
hair was removed to make haircloth and teeth were harvested
for gold fillings. Tons of hair remained in warehouses upon
liberation of the camps.
Some of the prisoners were used as slave labor in large
industrial factories for such companies as I. G. Farben (a
chemical manufacturing enterprise) and Krupp (manufacturers
of armaments, including the cannon displayed in McKenzie's
downtown Veterans Memorial Park.) Others survived thanks to
German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who rescued some 1,300
Jews from Auschwitz, using them as "essential labor" in his
factories. His life's purpose evolved from amassing
prosperity and privilege to saving lives at risk of his own
and amid the certain loss of his former wealth.
Schindler was immortalized by the book Schindler's List by
Thomas Keneally, which in 1994 was produced on film by
Steven Spielberg. During the production of the movie,
Spielberg was repeatedly approached by survivors anxious to
tell their stories. Originally wondering if they hoped to
have their experiences made into movies, he soon realized
their purpose was only to be heard, Chaim related.
To that end, Spielberg established the Survivors of the
Shoah Visual History Foundation as a nonprofit organization,
in order to document the experiences of Holocaust survivors
and other witnesses, including those who aided, rescued, and
liberated the survivors. Realizing the immediacy of
gathering the testimonies of the aging population, the
foundation acted quickly to collect nearly 52,000
testimonies in just six years.
"Human experience is at once enduring and compelling," said
Chaim, noting the extremes of behavior exemplified in the
war that brought out the best and the worst of human
natures.
Among testimonies shared at the human rights symposium, an
elderly gentleman still longed for his family that was
"liquidated in Auschwitz." Of his father, he noted, "I'm
sure he would be proud of my accomplishments," but
despaired, "I have almost lost my vision of how they
looked."
He related how the sight of an old photograph from France
had brought all his emotions rushing forward. Convulsing in
tears, he continued, "I feel there is a need to tell--to
yell--as loud as I can, what they did to my people."
Other men spoke of being reduced to the level of an animal,
or worse: of parents stripped from children at a time they
were most needed; of the almost complete genocide of an
ethnic group; of six million people killed; when lives often
hung in the balance of another human looking the other way
or making an anonymous phone call that spelled doom for his
fellow man.
One gentleman recalled making a long march with other men of
his family, including his Uncle Leopold, who once weighed in
at 280 and had been reduced to skin and bones. At a rest
stop, when the order was given to march on, Leopold was
unable to rise.
"My uncle yelled, 'Don't leave me here! Help me! Help me!'"
he recalled, in anguish that he had not heeded the call,
torn as he was between his own fate and marching on.
"Dimmer and dimmer and dimmer, I heard him call, 'Don't
leave me here! Help me, help me!'"
Another survivor, recalling his forced work detail, told how
each oven in the crematoria would hold three people.
"There was always a woman in the center and two men on each
side," he said. Because the women's bodies were higher in
fat, the flames would pass more easily through the men's
bodies to fuel hers.
"They think about everything; everything worked like a
watch, like a clock," he said of the efficiency of the death
camps.
He related as well the horror of the gas chambers, where
women and children huddled naked together after being told
to bundle their clothing and shoes for retrieval after
passing through the showers. Herded into a huge, open room,
they screamed in confusion and terror upon seeing a like
herd of naked men also coming into the chamber.
"When everybody was in they closed the doors and I could
hear 3,000 people crying, 'Hear Oh Israel...' They were
calling God... the noise is still in my ears."
The Future
The Shoah Foundation's hope for the future is "a new and
equally urgent mission: to overcome prejudice, intolerance,
and bigotry and the suffering they cause." Through the
educational use of visual history testimonies, the
foundation encourages people to think critically about bias
and intolerance.
Hitler was aided and abetted by the Great Depression as
people worldwide sought to reduce their own discomfort. In
1939, the United States and Cuba turned away 907 Jewish
refugees from Germany. The same year, Congress rejected a
bill that would have admitted temporarily 20,000 Jewish
refugee children under the age of 14 from Nazi Germany.
Mrs. Sadako Ogata, United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees from 1991 to 2000, in 1997 noted, "Is neutrality
morally and practically viable in the face of widespread
atrocities? Why was no country prepared to step into Rwanda
at the height of genocide in 1994? Why was the Mutinational
Force, that had been authorized to come to the rescue of
hundreds of thousands of refugees in eastern Zaire, canceled
in December of last year? Thousands of people have perished
in eastern Zaire since then. The answer to these questions
seems clear. It is because the major powers perceived no
strategic interest or because their interests did not
converge. In that sense the situation does not fundamentally
differ from the Cold War years when political interests,
stemming from ideological confrontation, were a cause for
not halting the killing fields of Cambodia."
Today when the United States is immersed in an effort to
rebuild a nation brought to its knees by a despot known to
have killed thousands of his own people, and where women are
only now beginning to be allowed basic human rights, it took
9-11 to sharpen the senses toward an intolerant foe.
The Shoah Foundation is all too keenly aware of the
importance of education regarding the Holocaust in order to
prevent future atrocities.
Chaim Singer-Frankes planted seeds of enhanced awareness
among all who were present at the Laddie Lollar Human Rights
symposium, seeds that have already born fruit.
"'Wastikas are evil," my four-year-old granddaughter said
following an impromptu lesson regarding the Nazi swastika
symbol, given her by my son, a Bethel student who was
present at the symposium.
We owe it to her and Adinah's generation to pass it on.
