‘A lot of hate in this world now’

Holocaust survivor reflects

Rena Finder has tasted burning ash raining down from a Nazi crematorium, watched people tortured and shot in the street and heard the cries of children being carted away to their deaths.

Finder’s father and six of his brothers were killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp, but she and her mother were plucked by Oskar Schindler — made famous by the 1993 Steven Spielberg movie “Schindler’s List” — to work in his munitions and enamelware factory, saving their lives.

Finder, 88, who lives in South Florida during the winter, is scheduled to speak at 7:30 p.m. Sunday at the Westin Lake Mary.

She said her tale of suffering and survival is especially timely in the current era of intolerant speech, anti-Semitic threats and violence and global terror attacks.

“There is a lot of hate in this world right now,” said Finder, who lives in Boston most of the year. “I don’t see that the world has learned a lesson about what hate can do and how people

suffer for no reason.”

She grew up in Krakow, Poland. Her father, a sales manager, traveled to Germany for work, and before World War II, Finder thought of Germans as cultured people: writers, composers and inventors.

But when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Finder, then 10, and her family were forced into a ghetto, where she and her mother were put to work as slave labor in a printing shop.

The Gestapo took away her father and grandparents, and Finder and other residents were transferred to nearby Plaszow, a forced-labor camp that became a concentration camp later in the war.

Then Schindler, a German industrialist, came to the rescue.

He established a factory in Krakow and is credited with saving the lives of about 1,200 Jews — including Finder and her mother — by hiring them at great risk to himself and his wife, Emilie. Instead of the starvation diet of the work camp, they were fed bread and soup with potatoes and occasionally had meat, too.

“The Schindler story inspires us to stand up for what is right and true no matter what society says,” said Rabbi Yanky Majesky of Chabad of North Orlando, which is hosting Finder’s speech.

For more than 3 weeks, Finder and her mother were wrenched away to Auschwitz, but they were among 300 women Schindler saved by bribing the commander, Finder said.

She and her mother eventually made their way to a displaced-persons camp in Austria. There, at 17, she married Marcel “Mark” Finder, who lost his entire family in the Holocaust. They moved to Massachusetts, had three children and remained married for 65 years, until he died in 2011.

Her revenge is that she survived — and flourished.

“I’m grateful that I’m alive and that I had wonderful parents, a wonderful husband, great kids,” Finder said. “And I feel that as an eyewitness it’s my responsibility to share my experiences with the people who know nothing — especially people who say the Holocaust didn’t happen. Forgetting is dangerous.”

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CARLINE JEAN/STAFF PHOTOGARPHER Rena Finder and her mother were selected by Oskar Schindler to work in his factory, saving their lives.