The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
Holocaust survivor inspires students
ONEIDA CASTLE, N.Y. » A student of Holy Cross Academy managed to impress Holocaust survivor Magda Brown with her attention and initiative.
Brown, who came to HCA on Monday to speak about her past and the future students could make, credits Claire Breckenridge, 14, for being able to speak.
Claire was studying the Holocaust at Holy Cross Academy and reached out to Brown to ask her questions. Brown’s website, magdabrown.com, shows people her history and gives them a chance to ask her questions.
“Generally, it’s a one time situation. A child studies the subject, I answer the question and I’m done,” Brown said. “Maybe they send a thank you, maybe not. But in this case, Claire was more interested and kept communicating with me until she came up with the idea that she could raise enough funds to bring us here for a presentation.”
Sarah Pennise, 14, said she helped Claire raise money after being approached over the summer.
“Claire told me about it and asked if I wanted to help her bring a Holocaust survivor to our school, and that was probably in August,” Sarah said. “Claire said she needed to raise all this money and I said I’d help.”
They raised $1,500 all the way up to January through bake sales,
church donations and other fundraising outreaches to bring Brown to Oneida Castle, the first time a Holocaust survivor spoke at their school.
“During this holy season of Lent, when we concentrate on penance and sacrifice, we are privileged to hear a story of extreme sacrifice and untold suffer- ing experienced by a young girl,” said Holy Cross Principal Teri Maciag. “As we hear this story, let us pray for her people and those being persecuted throughout the world.”
Born in June 11, 1927, in Miskolc, Hungary, Brown said she lead an unventful but happy childhood. Living in Hungary during Adolph Hitler’s rise to power, Brown said her country wasn’t occupied by German forces since they were allies, but people still suffered.
A number of anti-Jewish laws were passed in succession that enforced such things as only allowing 1 percent of Jewish children into higher education or restricted intermarriage and confiscation of properties. Eventually, the Jewish Hungarian people were stripped of everything and kept in ghettos.
Laws kept coming until, finally, Brown and her family were deported. On her 17th birthday, Brown had to pack up all of her belongings into a small brown shopping bag and was loaded onto a train car. She and her family traveled for three days with no food or water until they finally reached their destination: The Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in Poland.
“At this point, you have no name, no personality, nothing. You’re just a robot,” Brown said.
Brown lost her mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends to Auschwitz, but she was chosen to go to a work camp in Allendorf, Germany. There, she and other prisoners worked at a munitions factory producing bombs and rockets.
“They housed us in an old army barracks, which meant the conditions got improved. Now we had a room meant for 16 people, a bunk bed and blankets. It was an immense luxury. Far from civilized, but compared to what we had, it was an improvement,” Brown said. “The labor in the factory, therewere pipes and they would carry very hazardous, poisonous liquids and it would come to your station and then you would fill it in the bomb.”
Brown and her fellow prisoners worked without protection and by the third month, their hair was falling out and turning orange, their faces yellow and lips turned bright purple.
At the end of March 1945, the German commander of the factory was ordered to relocate 300 miles away to Buchenwald, by foot; a death march for the prisoners. By the third day. Brown and several other prisoners decided it was time to make their escape attempt.
“The worst they could do was shoot us, kill us,” Brown said. “During the night, we went through this farmland and spotted a barn. We crawled, one by one and reached the barn filled with hay, manure and pig sties.”
Brown and her group hid in the hay for almost two days until they were found by two American soldiers.
Since liberation, Brown has reunited with members of her family, become a United States citizen and shared her experience with others.
“The whole gist of this is to pass something on to the next generation,” Brown said. “To teach the children that genocide builds gradually and all the things about my testimony built gradually. It didn’t just happen.”
There are three things Brown hopes youths take away from her talks: that genocide doesn’t happen from one minute to the next and that the children should protect their freedom; that they should stand up to the deniers; and to think before they hate.
Sarah said she felt empowered after hearing Brown speak.
“I didn’t think anyone who went through such a tragedy like the Holocaust could ever find such joy in little things,” Sarah said. “She’s so sweet. I went with Claire and her mom to greet her at the airport and she greeted us with hugs, she’s just so sweet.”
“I am hoping the children have the power to change the future. I am hoping they listen to what I have to say. I am hoping they will become upstanding citizens. I’ve had thousands of thank you letters over the years and every one of them promises they will never forget my story and they will listen to what I had to say,” Brown said. “They are responding positively and I’m hoping that because they are writing, they are believing. They are the future.”
Holy Cross Academy is initiating a scholarship in Magda Brown’s name for a student who continues the study of history.