Alter Wiener

We went to see Alter Wiener speak at a local library recently.  Mr. Wiener is a local resident and  Holocaust survivor and the author of From A Name to A Number: A Holocaust Survivor's Autobiography.  Another mom from our homeschool group invited our group to attend with her family, and got quite a mixed reaction.  The idea of bringing young kids to hear about the Holocaust doesn't sound like a great idea to a lot of people.  My main reason for wanting to bring Jasper is that there are fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors around, and the number of them who are able and willing to speak publicly about it must be much smaller.  Mr. Wiener himself is 86.  The other reason is more personal.  My father was a Quaker who had a choice to be a conscientious objector, but instead chose to join the Army.  He served his country in Germany towards the very end of the war.  He rarely spoke of it, but he had nightmares about it almost every night until he died, and profoundly affected his outlook on life.  I want Jasper to have some understanding of the choice his grandfather made and what that choice meant.  Jasper is not easily disturbed by things that are scary, and I thought that the worst thing that could happen would be that we simply left early.  In fact, Mr. Wiener's talk was not at all disturbing, and was deeply moving.   There were many children in the audience.  It also made me think again about the importance of learning things in real life- hearing Mr. Wiener talk made far more of an impact on everyone present, especially the young people, than I would expect would happen just from reading a book.  An American serviceman in the audience mentioned that he had been to see a concentration camp, and found the experience deeply moving.  He said it is something he feels everyone should see.  A real person we can see, a real place we can touch- these things make learning much more vivid to us all.

Mr. Wiener said that in 2009, when Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was speaking at the U.N. and denied that the Holocaust ever took place, he went to the post office and mailed Ahmadinejad a copy of his book. He wondered how anyone could deny that the Holocaust took place, since the Nazis who were put on trial after the war never denied it themselves, they just said they were following orders.

Mr. Wiener then simply told the story of his life, beginning with the Nazi invasion of Poland when he was 13, when his father was killed.  At 15, he was sent to the first of five concentration camps.  There he discovered just how broad the Nazi genocide was, as there were dozens of groups targeted besides Jews.  "Every Jew was a victim, but not every victim was a Jew".  He pointed out that the Nazis murdered 250,000 German babies due to supposed physical defects.

He said that one of the most profoundly moving things that happened to him was when he was put on a crew to dismantle machines in a factory that was staffed by German civilians.  The Germans were forbidden even to make eye contact with the prisoners.  But one day a German woman chanced to get his attention by pointing.  Later he went to look where she had pointed, and found she had left him a sandwich.  Every day for 30 days she left him a sandwich, although the punishment if she had been caught would have been death.  He would never know what motivated her, and would never know her name, which made his search for her to thank her after the war fruitless.

At the fourth concentration camp, they determined that he was too weak to do any more work.  But they did not have a crematorium there, so they sent him to his fifth and final concentration camp.  He was in line for the crematorium, and could smell it, when a German guard pulled him out of the line and declared him still fit for work.  Two weeks later, guards did not come to get the prisoners in the morning, and several hours later, a Russian tank appeared; they were liberated. But unfortunately his troubles had not ended.  He said that those who were liberated by the Russians were given no services whatsoever, as the Russian Army simply had none to give.  Many died shortly afterwards.  They were all severely malnourished, and those who were not given special diets were not often able to survive on a normal diet.  After returning to his village in Poland, in an effort to find members of his family, he went on to wait eight years to come to America to join some extended family here.  In all he had lost 123 members of his family, including his father, stepmother, and both brothers.  When he finally came to  New York, he worked doing manual labor such as cleaning toilets until he was able to give himself enough education to pass a GED at age 35. Then he could finally be admitted to college to become an accountant.  When asked, Mr. Wiener said that he came from a very devout Jewish family, and he believed that he and the others who were able to survive did so largely because of the strength of their faith.  After the war, a villager told him that he had seen Mr. Wiener's father as he lay dying, and his father had said that since God had given him his life, it was His to take it away.

Of course the big question that Jasper has about the Holocaust is "Why?".  Mr. Wiener himself mentioned that he doesn't know the answer.  There simply isn't any answer that could ever, ever justify such a thing.  Someone in the audience spoke up and said that the Nazi theory of eugenics simply doesn't make scientific sense; any healthy gene pool must contain an abundance of diversity.  Although of course no sane person would ever think that such an idea could justify anything the Nazis did.

I was surprised to find that there are probably thousands of books specifically for young children on the Holocaust.  We checked out a sample from our library and found the quality and the strength of their messages of tolerance to be high. All focused on messages of hope, dignity, and survival.  None had graphic photographs.  It is hard to imagine a subject better suited to bring home the importance of learning history; that which happened well before we were born still can have a profound impact, and history has lessons that we ignore at our peril.