Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Holocaust survivors’ message of tolerance
SURVIVORS of the Holocaust shared their stories during the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day yesterday.
The day is also called the Yom Hashoah and each of the six survivors lit a memorial candle and gave testimony and a message on how the memory and lessons of the Holocaust can be taken forward.
The six candles each represented a million Jews for the six million who perished in the Nazi German genocide. The virtual commemoration was hosted by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD).
Ella Blumenthal, 100, said while still living in Poland as a family they had had a happy and secure life.
“My father was a successful textile merchant and I had a happy and secure childhood until all of it was swept away forever when Germany invaded Poland,” she said.
She said her whole family was sent to concentration camps in Poland. After the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto on April 19, 1943, all of her family members perished.
“The only remaining members of my family were my father, my niece, Roma, and I and after, we were deported to Majdanek. On arrival I was separated from my father, who I never saw again,” she said.
Blumenthal said they were liberated by the British in 1945.
She met a South African man in Israel, got married and moved to South Africa. She had lived in Cape Town ever since. Her marriage gave her four children, 11 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
“Had I not survived the death camps none of them would have been born. That in turn raises the question how many more children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren would my brothers and sisters have been brought into this world,” she said.
Blumenthal said even today, the Jewish people had never completely recovered from that devastation.
When they remembered the six million Jews who died, they did not think of them in terms of statistics but as distinctive individuals who had had their own, unique personalities.
“With the murder of each and everyone of them a special light was extinguished, and it is in the memory of all those extinguished lights that I light this candle today.”
Miriam Lichterman, 99, said she was 16 and still in high school when the Germans invaded Poland. She said of her whole family, only she and her sister survived.
“Somehow with divine providence, I survived long enough to be liberated by the Allies,” said Lichterman.
In 1947 she immigrated with her husband to South Africa, where they were able to build a new life. Over the years she always tried to use her experiences as a means of educating people about the evil of racial and anti-Semitic hatred and the values of tolerance and acceptance of differences.
“There is nothing to be gained from hating and vengeance. Even in inhumane circumstances we must remain human and caring of each other. This is the last message my parents gave me and I give it to you,” she said.