Let us remember the children of the Holocaust

By Abe Price, Jan. 9, 1923-Feb. 25, 2014; Originally printed in the April 1999 Federation Star

Note: Abe Price was a Holocaust survivor, a lecturer-writer-educator and one of the founders of the Holocaust Museum in Naples.

The memory of the beautiful and innocent children of the Holocaust is our legacy. One and a half million children were struck down without pity. They were murdered simply for who they were — Jews. The young ones, who were silenced forever, were the hope and future of our people. We will never know the extent of human potential that was destroyed — the scientists, the writers, the musicians — gifted talent burned to ashes by German and Austrian Nazi hate and all their dedicated and blind collaborators.

At such tender ages, our children grew old overnight. They quickly learned how to conceal pain and how to cover up fear. More importantly, with natural compassion, they comforted those around them. How can we forget these martyred children? Their lives, their laughter, their gentle love, their strength and bravery in face of certain death are still part of our daily lives. Their acts of courage and resistance remain a heroic inspiration. Their cries to be remembered ring across the decades, and we hear them. They are always in our thoughts, in our sleepless nights, in our pained hearts.

During the deportations to the extermination camps, our Gentile neighbors went about their daily lives, insensitive and indifferent to the tragedy in progress. Some were even happy, applauding our suffering. I survived by luck, by faith or accident, in order to be a witness to the Nazi crimes and to keep alive the memory of the children, my loved ones and my people.

The Nazis disgraced the human race when they forced 120 people into a box car and closed the doors and the little windows.

Before entering the box cars, the Nazis robbed the people and beat and humiliated them. With their guns, whips and dogs, they created hysteria. Without sanitary facilities, air, water and food and with standing room only, the box car became a torture chamber for the people riding two or three days and nights to their destination — the extermination camp. The gas chamber was a relief from the suffering.

The Nazis behaved worse than wild beasts, who kill only when they are hungry. The more people the Nazis murdered, the hungrier they got. Who did they murder? They were innocent and unarmed civilians — men women and children. When the Nazis opened the box car doors after the two- to three-day trip, half of the people were dead.

There was no closure when the war ended. The Nazi criminals escaped justice. The killers —Einsatz Commandos — disappeared into thin air with the help of many Nazi collaborators and some sympathetic governments and institutions. They murdered over six million good and pious people and destroyed the Jewish culture in Europe that existed 2,000 years. The Nazis should be condemned forever.

My prayers were not answered, my dreams not fulfilled. After the Nazis were defeated, I hoped to be the judge, jury and executioner of the Nazi murderers known to me. Almost all disappeared.

Liberation by the Allied armies restored many survivors, and my sincere gratitude goes to the men and women who, at the risk of their own lives, liberated starving people in death camps. It was there where soldiers destined for battle became healers, reaching out to save those who were on the brink of death, to revive human skeletons that had given up and lost faith in humanity. I wish they had liberated us five years earlier. The American flag is far more than a piece of cloth. It is a symbol of freedom and hope.

Our history would have been very different if the state of Israel had existed 60 years ago. Many survivors became part of this great country that adopted us, and we are grateful Americans. Although we are now in the winter of our lives, we look toward the future because we believe that by sharing our experiences and by bearing witness and educating others, there is hope of protecting new generations of men, women and children who might be abandoned, forgotten, persecuted and murdered.

We remember not for ourselves but for others and those yet unborn. Knowing that the impossible is possible, there is the chance that history can be repeated unless we are mindful

The task of preserving the Holocaust memory will soon pass to our children and grandchildren, to high school and middle school teachers, to custodians of Holocaust centers and, most importantly, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. But monuments of stone and well-written textbooks are not enough. Personal dedication to remembrance and to telling and retelling the true stories of the brutality of the Holocaust with their lessons for humanity must become a mission for all generations to come.

In these great institutions of learning, we see many symbols of the ideals that America represents — liberty, equality and justice. It was the collective rejection of such principles by some nations that made the Holocaust possible. Today, let us, young and old alike, promise to keep an ever-watchful eye for those who defy these precious principles of human conduct. Let us remember.

American gives us the freedom to be what we are. Preserving our unique heritage contributes to the strength and diversity of this wonderful country.

Suffering is supposed to purify the soul, but too much suffering kills the body.

I can’t forget and will not forgive the Nazi killers for what they did to me, my loved ones and my people.

It is a personal loss and a national tragedy, a wound that will not close until death itself arrives to heal it over.

I mourn a world that is dead, and the dead are alive in my heart. In their deaths, my loved ones commanded me to live.

I am proud to be Jewish — proud of my heritage and ancestors that gave the world the Ten Commandments.

My mission is history and Holocaust education.