Florida Holocaust Museum, Sam Gross Summer Institute 2013 Day 1

I am pleased to note my acceptance to the Sam Gross Summer Institute 2013.  It is a fabulous workshop that I am taking this in conjunction with the University of South Florida St. Petersburg course EDG 6931.  It is an interactive week-long look at the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights held in the Holocaust Museum itself.  Included are materials for reflection, tours, academic lectures, and speakers who are survivors of the Holocaust.

June 10, 2013:  Today was the first day of the event. Reading materials were sent to the students a month in advance to contemplate and work through.  I have often marveled at the abilities of humankind.  We have such potential and as a professor of Religious Studies and Humanities I see the greatness within our species every day.  Yet, there remains a darkness within us that I have never understood:  the urge to hurt each other.  I have taught various courses on the human experience for most of my adult life and find one unifying idea:  we all want to be happy.  The second commonality is that life is unpredictable and difficult.  Things happen to us, but if we hold onto the anger and resentment it eats away at us until we are no longer human.  The Holocaust, and the various other genocides that we are studying, is that darkness magnified million fold.  What happens to allow such events?  What has the United States done in dealing with genocide?  (Based on the readings, this is the question that nags at me the most).  What can we do to prevent it from happening again?  (The course materials do note that there are several other horrific events that have happened since the Holocaust worldwide.  In Florida alone there are several human rights violations found with human trafficking and the recent rediscovery of the Dozier reform school for boys).   

Today we learned about the rise of the Nazi party in Germany.  Much of it I have heard and taught before, but hearing it in the context of our speaker, Dr. Peter Black, I learned a new level of humanism.  A series of events, political issues and guffaws, and odd happenstance worked together to create the momentum needed for the Nazis to gain political control.  Germany dealt with a poor economy, unemployment, a fractured government (perhaps too many political parties), fear of communism, a rise in feminism and sexual awareness, and questions of moral purity.  The Germans were demoralized by their own sense of powerlessness from the Versailles Treaty and angry that the blame for World War I fell to them.  Though not an excuse for the things that happened it served to show how history is shaped when negativity is allowed to fester. 

We also met and listened to Lisl Schick, a Jewish woman who was raised in Vienna.  She was there when the Nazis came in to Austria and she described how quickly Jewish families were targeted by the law.  She had an amazing story of misfortune and fortune.  Though her grandfather was a recognized war hero, his status did not save the family from the isolation of prejudice.  Her father lost his job, her friends abandoned her, she lost her home.  In a moment of desperation her parents sent her and her brother on the Kintertransport into England.  She was 11 years old and her brother was 7.  She sat on a train with children marked with numbers to indicate what country in which they would resettle.  They went to England where they experienced life in something akin to foster care.  Of the 10,000 children taken through the system only 1,000 would reunite with their parents.  She and her brother were of the later group.

Her father was sent from Austria by his former employers (a bank who did relocate some of the Jewish ex-employees out of the country).  He came to England where, with no money, he worked what jobs he could.  He saw his children weekly until England, out of fear of German spies, rounded up the immigrants and put them into camps. Her father, again, had the good fortune to go to the Isle of Mann where the prisoners got better treatment than those sent to Australia.  Their mother had a remote contact, friends of a cousin, in America who agreed to sponsor her immigration to this country.  She worked for years as a maid and garment maker.  Only after 6 years had passed did the family come back together in New York to live in their mother's one bedroom apartment.  She later met and married her husband, a fellow Holocaust refugee who came to America.  He went from janitor to doctor, and was the first radiologist on staff at a local Clearwater hospital in the 1960s.

Though her life had a horrific start she was more fortunate than many.   Her uncle and her grandparents lost their lives in Austria; her grandparents were shot to death and the uncle died under forced labor.  Yet, she remains optimistic and upbeat.  A woman in her 80s, she explains that she does not harbor hate because that negativity only harms.  She talks about bullying and how harmful it is.  She smiles when she describes her own grandchildren and how she spoils them.  Most of all, however, she is emphatic about how prejudice and hate must be eradiated.  She wants no one to suffer the uncertainty she felt as a child.   She wants the phrase "never again" to be a reality. And she knows that only by talking about it can we educate the generations to become better and more loving than those before. Her experience has allowed her to see what I see in more graphic details:  the horrors that humanity can inflict upon itself and the loving care of upstanders defying that darkness to allow compassion to shine through.