Holocaust Survivor
05 / 05 / 2013
There is a very famous saying in Iraq says that, “Who sees other’s calamity, his calamity trivializes.” My family had faced discrimination, persecution and deportation during Saddam’s regime. As Jews, Kurds were seen as a different race that should be removed from the country by force. But once I met Helen Handler, the Holocaust survivor, I strongly believe that what we faced as Kurds during Saddam Hussein’s regime was nothing compared to what happened to Jews during WWII.
I was mesmerized by Helen’s charisma in which she showed a very strong woman with all that sufferings she faced before. She was full of humor and happiness in her eighties, and I guess this is what made her a strong woman that overcame her sorrows. She narrated to us what Nazis did to Jews in Auschwitz Camp. They had no food, no drinks, and not enough clothes; but with all that, she hadn’t lost her faith in God. She said, “I survived NOT because I wanted to survive, but because there was always someone who saved me.”
Helen was sad in her speech that the holocaust was a shame to humanity. She said that she’s ashamed, not because she’s Jewish, but because she belongs to human that did such atrocities against human also. I asked her if she noticed any hate or racism from the European societies, specifically, German society. She answered, “No”. She said that there was no hate or racist action against the Jews from the European societies because they lived there for years and years and didn’t notice such kind of things at all. She added that she understood that people can hate Jews because they represented a different religion as Jews hate others for same reason maybe, but that doesn’t mean that those people wanted us to die. It was just Hitler and his racist party that tried to clear Europe from us, but not the societies themselves.
What interested me in all Helen’s details was the power that this woman had. She told us that there was a Jewish Psychiatrist imprisoned with them in Auschwitz Camp. This psychiatrist had told them that if they want to survive, they should first, decide to live, secondly, think that this will end and thirdly, think about the love that your family gives to you. These were three valuable advices that created a life for those desperate people in their camp. Auschwitz should give us a lesson on how we should accept each other; otherwise, we all end up in an “Auschwitz” environment in which we all hate each other for no reason.
Germans were trying to kill all those Jews that were imprisoned in the Nazi Camps, including Auschwitz, because they didn’t want to leave any proof of persecuting Jews, as Helen believed. But she was lucky when the Russian Forces had entered Auschwitz Camp at the end of the WWII and saved the rest of Jews there before the Nazis completed their mission. Now, she with the left Jews had survived from Auschwitz, but the question is: is she now safe from the racism? I don’t think so. We all are still threatened by racism. It will continue since we as human still believe in certain kind of ideologies, religions, races, philosophical doctrines, and pre-existing thoughts. Structuralistically, we humans are fully buried in those structures and cannot see out of them, no matter how independent we are. That’s why the structuralism had announced the death of human as the German Philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche, announced the death of God before.
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I was mesmerized by Helen’s charisma in which she showed a very strong woman with all that sufferings she faced before. She was full of humor and happiness in her eighties, and I guess this is what made her a strong woman that overcame her sorrows. She narrated to us what Nazis did to Jews in Auschwitz Camp. They had no food, no drinks, and not enough clothes; but with all that, she hadn’t lost her faith in God. She said, “I survived NOT because I wanted to survive, but because there was always someone who saved me.”
Helen was sad in her speech that the holocaust was a shame to humanity. She said that she’s ashamed, not because she’s Jewish, but because she belongs to human that did such atrocities against human also. I asked her if she noticed any hate or racism from the European societies, specifically, German society. She answered, “No”. She said that there was no hate or racist action against the Jews from the European societies because they lived there for years and years and didn’t notice such kind of things at all. She added that she understood that people can hate Jews because they represented a different religion as Jews hate others for same reason maybe, but that doesn’t mean that those people wanted us to die. It was just Hitler and his racist party that tried to clear Europe from us, but not the societies themselves.
What interested me in all Helen’s details was the power that this woman had. She told us that there was a Jewish Psychiatrist imprisoned with them in Auschwitz Camp. This psychiatrist had told them that if they want to survive, they should first, decide to live, secondly, think that this will end and thirdly, think about the love that your family gives to you. These were three valuable advices that created a life for those desperate people in their camp. Auschwitz should give us a lesson on how we should accept each other; otherwise, we all end up in an “Auschwitz” environment in which we all hate each other for no reason.
Germans were trying to kill all those Jews that were imprisoned in the Nazi Camps, including Auschwitz, because they didn’t want to leave any proof of persecuting Jews, as Helen believed. But she was lucky when the Russian Forces had entered Auschwitz Camp at the end of the WWII and saved the rest of Jews there before the Nazis completed their mission. Now, she with the left Jews had survived from Auschwitz, but the question is: is she now safe from the racism? I don’t think so. We all are still threatened by racism. It will continue since we as human still believe in certain kind of ideologies, religions, races, philosophical doctrines, and pre-existing thoughts. Structuralistically, we humans are fully buried in those structures and cannot see out of them, no matter how independent we are. That’s why the structuralism had announced the death of human as the German Philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche, announced the death of God before.
Back to the articles page