‘Tell them about my Mama and Papa’
Holocaust survivor calls for mandatory education
A Holocaust survivor who lives in Framingham shared her painful story with local students on Holocaust Remembrance Day, telling them to “speak up” about the genocide of millions, including her parents who were gassed to death at Auschwitz.
Sylvia Ruth Gutmann — who spent years as a “hidden child” in Europe — also called for mandatory Holocaust education and said the Duxbury football team using anti-Semitic language was a “shocking” situation that made her cry.
The Holocaust started because of “indifference and ignorance,” Gutmann said during an Anti-Defamation League New England virtual event Thursday.
“Today in 2021, there are people that feel that this never happened,” she added. “And there are huge amounts of millennials that don’t even know what Auschwitz is, or they have never heard of the Holocaust.”
The students who heard her harrowing story on Thursday are now “witnesses” and have to “speak up” about the atrocities of the Holocaust, Gutmann said.
“Tell everyone that it did happen, that you saw the face of a child who had no grandparents, no parents. That this is wrong. This is wrong,” she said, adding, “Tell them about my Mama and my Papa.”
Born in Belgium in 1939 to Jewish parents who had been forced to flee their Berlin home, she spent her first three years in hiding in France.
Then in 1942 — with her father Nathan ill and bedridden — she and her mother
Malcha and two older sisters were arrested and shipped to the Rivesaltes internment camp.
She talked about being rounded up and getting transported to the camp, where she was separated from her mother and slept on “straw-filled floors with lice … there was no sanitary anything.” They got one cup of “rotten” tomato soup with a slice of hard bread.
Then one day, her 34-yearold mother was deported to Auschwitz.
“Four days later, my beautiful mother is gassed in Auschwitz,” she said as she teared up. “Six months later, they will find my father who is in hiding, and he also will perish in the gas chamber.”
Gutmann and her sisters came to America in 1946, when she was 7 years old.
“I think most importantly,
I’ve learned that we can overcome almost everything,” she said.
Robert Trestan of ADL New England said Gutmann “really placed us in the
moment” of the Holocaust.
“We are going to continue to tell this story and make sure that future generations, the people that will come after all of us, will continue to know the story,” Trestan said.
Gutmann stressed the importance of making Holocaust teaching a requirement.
“Not enough schools teach the Holocaust, and that pains me a lot,” she said of U.S. schools. “It should be mandatory.”
There has been a push in Massachusetts for mandatory Holocaust and genocide education in the wake of Duxbury High School football
players using “Auschwitz” and other antiSemitic language for their play calls.
“It was shocking. It was shocking,” Gutmann said about the Duxbury situation. “I wept.”
“I would like to believe they didn’t know that the use of this language was disgraceful,” she said. “I would like to believe that they didn’t know anything about the Holocaust and Auschwitz. I would like to believe that, but if that is not true, then this makes it even more outrageous, and it makes it even more important to be taught in schools. All of them.”