Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Museum to host presentation on Holocaust, Syria war
Alfred Munzer never left his house for more than three years. When he was a 9-month-old baby in hiding by righteous Christians in Hitler’s Europe, his only view of the outside world was through the mail slot, he said. His family would eventually be destroyed: his father would die from malnutrition and tuberculosis, his two sisters murdered.
As a Syrian immigrant, Mouaz Moustafa often returns home in his role as executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, an organization that advocates for democratic rule in Syria. He said he meets families who have nothing to eat, who have constant fear of airstrikes; he sees communities shattered. He said his own family has been devastated: relatives jailed by the Assad government and never heard from again.
Munzer and Moustafa will share their stories in South Florida, in a program called “Fleeing Atrocities: Witness Per- spectives.” The event is coordinated by the Washington, D.C.-based United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The free program will be 7 p.m. Thursday at Nova Southeastern University’s Performing Arts Center in Davie.
Hearing the stories of the men firsthand should prompt Americans to pay attention to genocide today, event organizers said.
Naomi Kikoler, the event moderator
and deputy director of the museum’s Center for Prevention of Genocide, said the idea is to promote awareness “to not see a repeat of the Holocaust.”
“We want to do for communities today what was not done for Jews during the second World War,” she said.
In the Holocaust, 6 million Jews were killed, including in gas chambers and slave labor camps.
In Syria, Kikoler said at least 250,000 were killed; more than 8 million have been displaced within Syria; and 4.8 million have fled Syria — the majority to Turkey, Iraq or Jordan — since the crisis began six years ago.
“Yes, we talk a lot of terrorism, [but] it’s innocent civilians that bear the brunt of the crimes and atrocities in Syria,” she said. The museum wants to “tell their stories and humanize the conflict a little bit.”
Moustafa, 32, lives in Washington, D.C. His family left Damascus when he was 11, he said. His family had not opposed the Assad government, but several were arrested, including a year-old baby and a 4-year-old preschooler, he said.
Two relatives, arrested in August 2013, haven’t been heard from since, he said.
There are no jobs, there is fear from both the Islamic State terrorists and bombings by their own government. Children pass out in class from lack of food.
The refugees would prefer to stay at home but are running for their lives, he said. “They are not immigrants going for better health insurance and better taxes.”
“It’s really very sad,” he sad. “They have nothing.”
Munzer, 75, also lives in Washington, D.C. A retired pulmonologist and former president of the American Lung Association, he was born in Holland during Nazi occupation.
In the following months, he was given to a trusted neighbor who suggested he be hidden with her ex-husband and their children and nanny. Munzer said the family renamed him “Bobby” so if a neighbor heard them calling him they would assume they had said “Robby,” the family’s son.
He lived there until he was 4 years old, when he was reunited with his mother after liberation, never stepping outside, he said.
His sisters were hidden with a Catholic family in a match made by a priest, although the husband would soon turn them in, he said. The wife was arrested and sent to prison, and Munz- er’s sisters, age 8 and 6, were taken to Auschwitz in Poland where they died.
He said the parallels of the Holocaust is “the suffering of the people. The saddest part about the Holocaust is that people hoped ‘never again.’ And in actual fact the Holocaust was not the last genocide, not the last act of state-sponsored atrocity.”
The events of the two calamities are different, “but the suffering of people is the same: people trying to run, people trying to find help.”
“I feel for those people,” Munzer said. “When I see images of little children hurt, the little child washed up on the beach, when I see those images, I think of my own sisters killed in February 1944.”
In addition to the men’s presentation in Davie, they also will be speaking at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the University of Miami’s Newman Alumni Center in Coral Gables.
The free events are open to the public. For reservations, call the museum’s southeast regional office at 561-995-6773.