Making the world a better place

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

From the evaluation forms handed in after the High School Symposium on the Holocaust at Sentinel Secondary School Feb. 27, one thing was clear. While the students appreciated the entire half-day program, their favorite part was the survivor speaker, Peter Parker.

Parker survived much during the Holocaust and the experiences he shared with the students were from the time he was a young boy in Vienna till the end of the war. He connected with his audience immediately, first breaking the news to them that he was not Spider Man (the cartoon superhero aka Daily Planet reporter Peter Parker). He then went on to tell his story, using some humor, but mincing no words.

Parker was at the West Vancouver school with Holocaust educator Kit Krieger and Dr. Graham Forst of the continuing education departments of Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia. The satellite symposium was one of several that the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) presents each year.

The symposia take place in school districts across British Columbia and consist of an overview of the Holocaust, a film, a survivor speaker and a student question-and-answer period. The outreach program – supported by the Vaisler Family, in memory of Syd and Sari Vaisler – supplements the VHEC's Annual High School Symposium on the Holocaust at the University of British Columbia. It began in 1975 as a two-day event at UBC. Last year, according to the VHEC's annual report, some 1,000 students from 22 schools attended the UBC program and 320 students from six schools attended a half-day overflow event at the Norman Rothstein Theatre. The satellite program is also experiencing increasing demand.

Forst opened the recent symposium. He noted that, given the current global economic crisis, there is a risk that there will be a search for scapegoats, "and that means trouble for ethnic minorities. That's why we have to study what happened in Germany during the 1930s."

To help students understand what it meant that six million Jews were murdered, Forst said, "If you can imagine every town and city of British Columbia, from Victoria to Nanaimo to Vancouver or here on the North Shore ... all the way to Prince George and beyond, completely quiet, all the schools, malls, parks, businesses, houses, completely empty, you have some idea of how many people six million is and we're only two-thirds of the way there." This is why the symposia are such valuable experiences, continued Forst, "especially because you people are among the very, very last to actually be able to say, 'When I was young, I was in the same room and heard speaking an actual survivor of the Holocaust.'"

Before turning the podium over to Krieger, Forst noted that, when a dictatorship arises, such as Adolf Hitler's in Germany, "if you're of minority ethnic origin, you could be called inferior and put to death. If you're gay or in any way handicapped ... if your teacher belongs to a labor union, or even to resist the government in any way, you're dead. If you're not from any of those categories and you decide to help somebody who is, you're also dead. Think about that as you think about the speakers today."

Krieger gave students a framework within which to think about the Holocaust. He pointed out that, 65 years ago, in 1944, up to 11,000 people a day were being killed at Auschwitz. "It's possible now with technology to kill on a greater scale," he said. "We must be attentive, we have to change our nature, we have to control our technology to make sure these things don't happen again."

To focus his presentation, Krieger used two questions from Lucy Dawidowicz's 1975 book The War Against the Jews. She chose this title to make a point, said Krieger. "She says the Holocaust is not World War II, it is a second war carried out under the cover of World War II," he explained, adding "she argues quite persuasively that, in fact, the war against the Jews meant more," as Hitler killed many Jews who, through forced labor, could have helped his larger war effort.

The questions on which Krieger based his remarks were: "How was it possible for a modern state to carry out the systematic murder of an entire people for no other reason than they were Jewish?" and "How is it possible for an entire people to allow themselves to be killed?"

First, Krieger focused on the modern state's capacity for bureaucratic organization and mass communication; the systematic, centrally- planned expression of state policy; and the long history of anti-Jewish attitudes in Europe. He stressed that Hitler's ideas were nothing new and that they were built on centuries of anti-Semitism. This fact and the implementation of the Holocaust in stages, beginning with the boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933, help answer the second question. While there was Jewish resistance, Krieger explained, giving several examples, it was limited by many factors, including that the Nazis deceived Jews into thinking they were being relocated, the Nazis would kill 100 Jews for every one Nazi killed by a Jewish resister and there was no outside assistance for the Jews of Europe.

After Krieger's presentation, part of the 1974 documentary World at War: Genocide was shown. Krieger let students know that they should not worry about what they felt when watching the film, that they would process its content in their own way, in due time. In addition to many compelling interviews, the film contains graphic archival film footage. After the screening, Forst was quick to assure students, saying that he remembered seeing it for the first time when he was their age. He told them that they weren't powerless, that they were capable of fighting racism; for example, they could speak up when they hear someone tell a racist joke.

While an overview of Parker's story can't communicate why the students were so moved – there is no way an article can capture the feelings evoked by hearing a Holocaust survivor speak – here are a few of the experiences he related.

Parker said his family in Vienna, where he was born, comprised his mother and his older sister. Times were tough during the Depression, he said, but his mother made sure they always had some food on the table and a roof over their heads. "I was a normal Viennese kid" he said. "And all that changed in 1938."

When Nazi Germany annexed Austria, the first thing Parker's teacher said was, "I want all the Jewish kids to raise their arms – there were six of us in a class of 28 – and we were told to go and sit at the back of the class." More and more restrictions were placed on the Jewish students.

"To an 11-year-old boy, it's hard to understand. Yesterday I was a normal, Austrian kid and today I'm subhuman." And "things in Vienna began getting pretty ghastly," said Parker, talking about the looting of Jewish stores, people who began disappearing. His mother took her children to Czechoslovakia, where she had relatives. "And things got back to quasi-normal, until spring of 1939, when the German army marched into Czechoslovakia. It was a like a déjà vu."

Parker's mother managed to get a job in Britain, but had to leave ahead of her children. Sadly, by the time Parker and his sister were preparing to join their mother, Britain and France had declared war on Germany, then Belgium was taken over by Germany. "Now we were stuck, for good," said Parker.

That winter, 1940/'41, Parker's grandmother died in an accident and he and his sister, at ages 14 and 15-and-a-half, "were now totally alone." The pair did odd jobs, slept where they could and fed themselves what they could. Parker said sometimes two or three days passed when they had not one morsel of food. They pretended to be Belgian, not wearing the Star of David Jews were required to wear at the time. They succeeded for a while, but his luck ran out and he was arrested; luckily, his sister managed to get away, though Parker wouldn't know till after the war that she'd survived.

Eventually, Parker was taken to Auschwitz. He described the degradation, hard labor, starvation and other horrific mistreatment at the camp, where, he said, "you were nothing." He spoke about always being guarded, and that the guards didn't need to account for why prisoners died. "When we went out, in a hundred in a group, and we came back, all that they were concerned [about] ... is that a hundred bodies came back."

Parker said he "lucked out. In the camp, I happened to meet a cook of the SS kitchen." A fellow Viennese Jew, Parker asked the cook for help and he gave Parker a job peeling potatoes. Working in the kitchen was indoors and allowed Parker to get a little more food, but he was still struck by typhus. Quarantined for days, Parker doesn't know how he survived, with no medication or water; he was 17 at the time and weighed 36 kilograms (about 80 pounds).

As the Russian army got closer, Parker and his fellow prisoners were forced to march to Dachau. Once there, those who survived were fed reasonably well, so that they would be able to do the back-breaking work needed on the building of an atomic facility.

The prisoners were soon put back on the cattle cars for Austria, this time with an anti-aircraft cannon at the end of the train. There was an air raid, the Americans thinking that the train was full of German troops, which was the SS's intention, said Parker. "A lot of people who had survived the camps for three to four years were killed by American bullets ... days before they would have been liberated."

After the war ended, said Parker, he went to Brussels. He found his sister and, together, they were soon reunited with their mother.

There were several questions from students for both Krieger and Parker. Students wanted to know what life was like for Parker after the war, what kind of food he was given in the camps, how he feels when he encounters Holocaust denial and whether his experiences affected his faith. They asked how the Holocaust was different from other genocides and whether either speaker was worried by anything they heard in the news these days. While neither believed that another Holocaust was probable, they did point to some concerns and stressed that our generation is no less susceptible to dictatorship – and the mistreatment of minorities – than the generation of the 1930s, and that the economic conditions now are similar to those that played a factor in Hitler's rise to power.

D'Arcy Griffiths of Sentinel Secondary School's social studies department concluded the program. "If there's one thing that I want you take away from today," he told students, "it's that I hope that you recognize that each and every one of us has to make a personal commitment to making the world a better place by leading better lives. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our communities and, most of all, we owe it to those who've died."

For more information about the high school symposia, contact 604-264-0499 or [email protected].

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