It's so hard to remember this little fact: we are lucky. And today, I was faced with this realization in my class: Meeting Hate with Humanity: The Holocaust. This class is housed in the Jewish Heritage Museum and hosts a living memorial to the Holocaust.
When I was eight, I read Judy Blume's Starring Sally Jane Freedman as Herself. It was about an elementary-aged American girl who lived during World War II. To her, the war was a world away and she and her friends would play a game called Concentration Camp where one person would be a prisoner and a few would be the guard and they would send each other to the showers... She would have nightmares about it and try to make sense of it, as did I. It was bizarre to me. Even the name, Concentration Camp. Being eight, I didn't get it and I believed that this was made up so I asked my fourth grade reading teacher. She told me that these camps did exist; they were real. My whole world was shaken.
Today, in my class, a woman named Sally Frishberg (once Sarah Engelberg) came to talk to us. She, basically, was a younger Anne Frank without a diary. Living in Poland during the 1930s, her and her family complied with all the new laws being passed every few months or so and for years, they just hoped that things would get better; that the badness would go away and take the fear with it. There was a soldier being quartered in her home who spoke Yiddish (as did her father). The confusing thing to Sally was how kind the soldiers were. She watched as him and her father played chess and talked late into the evening. He warned her father that this war was different. It wasn't just the soldiers that would suffer. He needed to think and listen to things that happen. And so, the final direction from the nazis to the Jews in her small Polish town: all Jews must report to the train station on this day at this time. Her father said to his family, "we are not going." To this day, Sally wonders to herself constantly why some people resist and some people don't. Where does this decision come from and what is the difference from person to person? In her case, it came down to circumstance. Her grandfather loved Germany, being a World War I veteran and he believed her father to be crazy. He showed up to the station and Sally never heard from him again.
So, her family of six, her aunt, uncle and their three children crept out into the farmland of Poland and, for a time, their life consisted of running by night, shaking trees for food, and hiding under bales of hay by day. One day, a family friend found them and agreed to hide them in their attic so that they wouldn't freeze to death with the coming of winter. The eleven family members lived in that attic together in silence for two years, clamping their hands over the infants' mouths the entire time. At one point, they were joined by four of Sally's uncles who were alive and on the run as well.
Sally spoke of the will of her family, the different ways that it effected each member of her family (her sister, very full of fear and insecure to this very day; her mother, very much effected by this experience) and I watched her speak of her life, her own will, and her family while her eyes twinkled with the look of absolute wonder and love, the tiniest bit of tear lingering along the bottom, and falling down her cheek; barely perceptable until the light hit in the right place.
This woman was living proof of the power of a person's will. She demonstrated the ability to live through these experiences and to come out of it by rising above and not hating. When I was in eighth grade, we read The Diary of Anne Frank and my English teacher, Miss Inglima asked us why we thought this was such an important book and why we continued to read it today. I raised my hand and answered the question with this answer: the fact that Anne Frank watched her own people be killed by the thousands while she hid away and wasn't filled with hate made it amazing.
I believe that Sally Frishberg, who is 77-years-old and gets driven around by her loving husband to speak on behalf of her experience is amazing. The difference between her and Anne Frank is that Anne Frank wasn't as lucky as to come out of her experience alive.
Thank you, Sally.
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