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May 16, 2003
Passing on their history
Survivor tells of miraculous escape from Sobibor.
KYLE BERGER REPORTER
More than 1,000 high school students from across the Lower Mainland
gathered in the lecture halls of the of the University of British
Columbia (UBC) for some valuable history lessons last week.
The students were attending the 28th Annual High School Symposium
on the Holocaust May 7 and 8, which featured several presentations
from survivors, historians and anti-racism speakers.
The students spent their mornings divided into smaller groups to
hear the stories of several local Holocaust survivors, including
Robbie Waisman, Bronia Sonnenschein, Ruth Sigal, Alex Buckman and
Robert Krell.
In the afternoon on May 8, the students gathered to hear about a
miraculous revolt and escape from the Sobibor death camp by one
of the rebellion's key contributors, Thomas (Toivi) Blatt.
Blatt, who now lives in southern California, served as a messenger
for a secret resistance group within the camp. After killing some
of the top commanders of the camp and getting their hands on some
weapons, the group initiated an escape from Sobibor that set more
than 300 Jews free from the Nazis. It was the most successful revolt
in any Nazi camp during the Holocaust.
Though Blatt's strong Polish accent and raspy voice made it difficult
for the students to follow some of his details, his presentation
was followed by a 15-minute clip from the movie Escape from Sobibor,
which documented the heroic event. Released in 1987, Escape from
Sobibor starred Rutger Hauer and Alan Arkin.
The video presentation was followed by a panel discussion, where
students had a few minutes to ask questions to survivors Waisman
and Sigal, as well as historian and UBC Prof. Chris Friedrichs.
With terrorism and a war in Iraq fresh in the students' minds, many
of the questions focused on what the world has learned from the
Holocaust.
Friedrichs painted a grim picture of how history may be doomed to
repeat itself – and already has.
"I actually don't think the world as a whole has learned very
much from the Holocaust," he told the students. "The people
who did the things that happened in Cambodia, Rwanda and Yugoslavia
knew about the Holocaust and some of them were inspired by what
happened in the Holocaust."
He added that the most important thing the students could do to
prevent such events in the future is to not allow themselves to
judge a person based on their ethnic, religious or social background.
Sigal added that education is also a key to preventing human rights
atrocities.
"I think what you can do is keep coming to these seminars and
tell other people what you learned today," she told the students.
"That's why we put ourselves on display to talk to you about
our feelings, which are very painful."
Erin Bockus, a Grade 12 students from Brookswood secondary in Langley,
said she found the symposium to be a unique learning experience.
"It was filled with lots of emotion and [the survivors] went
into a lot of stuff that teachers can't get into because they don't
know," she said. "The main thing I'm walking away with
today is the perspective of the people that were there, because
I hadn't ever heard about the thoughts and all the trauma that lived
with the people that went through it."
Each day of the symposium was concluded with a candlelighting tribute
in memory of the more than six million Jews who perished in the
Holocaust.
The symposium was put on by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
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