Editor’s Note: The presentation by Max and Rose Schindler at Grossmont College made a deep impression on many listeners. We have run one news story already, and here is another account provided by a former editor of the Grossmont Summit.
By William Dudley
EL CAJON, California –Around fifty Grossmont College community members, including participants in a program for at-risk incoming students, had the opportunity to learn about history and human resliency from two Holocaust survivors.
Longtime San Diegans Max and Rose Schindler spent almost three hours Monday afternoon at Grossmont’s Griffin Gate telling their stories and answering questions. They recounted memories both vividly specific and hazily uncertain, of horrific experiences both grand and petty. Their stories eventually merged into a happy ending of sorts — they met each other in England after World War II, married, and moved to the United States, where they prospered and raised a family. Yet it was clear Monday that the Nazi Germany’s infamous campaign to rid Europe of Jews and other “undesirables” still affected the Schindlers deeply.
Rose told of how the Jews of her village were taken by oxcart and train from their village to Auschwitz, how they were placed into separate lines upon arrival, (men, young women, and women and children) and how lying about her age kept her from her mother’s line that went straight to the gas chambers. She described her meals (coffee for breakfast, bread and margarine for lunch, soup for supper), how women were stripped nude for inspection to see if they were healthy enough for factory work, and how some committed suicide by grasping on the the electrified fence. One day she was once accosted by a strange man who turned out to be her father minus his beard and hat. “Whatever you do, do not separate,” her father told her and her two sisters. “Do whatever to stay alive to tell the world what they are doing to us here.”
After the Russians came and liberated the camps, she and her sisters attempted to return to their home village. Eventually Rose and her sister made it back to their family home, only to find it unlivable and their former neighbors threatening “to finish what Hitler started.” They were , however, able to find some jewelry hidden by her father in a shoepolish box. Rose showed the audience the golden chain around her neck that once held her father’s pocket watch.
Her father and brother were not with them; she later found out they were shot a few days before liberation. Of the 400 or so members of her extended family, she estimated that fewer than two dozen had survived.
Max, born in 1929 in Germany to Polish parents, told how he and his family had to move to a grandparent’s farmhouse in Poland. Jews began being rounded up in earnest in 1942. “The minute Germans marched in, anti-semitism among Poles was open and rampant,” he remembered.
He ended up being trained for and working on manufacturing aircraft for Germany. The factory and the conscripted labor force moved to several locations during the war, including underground salt mines and a facility in Dresden, where Max witnessed the Allied firebombing of the city in February 1945.
Following the destruction of the Dresden facility, Germans led Max and three hundred other Jewish prisoners on a “death march” in which stragglers were shot by following soldiers. Only 90 people survived to reach Theresienstadt, the transit and labor camp that the Nazis had spruced up at one point for Red Cross tours. It was there that Russians and Americans converged in 1945 and liberated Max and fellow survivors.
Audience questions
During the the question-and-answer portion of the event, the audience queries included how their tatoos were made (it “hurt like hell” according to Rose), whether they experienced discrimation in America (no, according to both), and how their experiences affected their religious views (we do not have to go to synagogue to remain Jewish, according to Max).
One question that was asked several times was whether they sought or continue to seek revenge or retribution, or instead embraced forgiveness of their persecutors.
The Schindlers bascially answered that there was little opportunity for any acts of retribution. Max said his only chance at such revenge was during during his postwar residency in London. He would ride his bicycle behind trucks carrying German prisoners of war and yell taunts at them.
However, in response to several prompts, both Max and Rose stopped short of saying they had forgiven — or could ever forgive — those who perpetuated the Holocaust. “I can never forget what Germany did to my family,” said Rose. “Would you forgive if someone killed your family?” She said her sister and fellow survivor Helen once told her that the “German people” didn’t do this, but asked then “who did?”
Grossmont’s Summer Institute
The seminar was part of Grossmont College’s Summer Institute program for disadvantaged students, administered by EOPS (Extended Opportinity Programs and Services). Participating students had also read and discussed “Night” by author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, and are scheduled to visit the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles today (Wednesday).ch
The 17 and 18-year-olds in the Summer Bridge include former foster care children, refugees from other countries, English learners, and others who face special challenges in attaining a college degree. Joseph Lepetri, a Grossmont College English teacher, identified two key lessons he hoped the students would take from the Schindlers. One was respect for diversity and other cultures. The second was seeing how people can overcome extraordinary circumstances.
Max Schindler had a third goal as well. “We are a dwindling number” of people with living memories of the Holocaust, he told the students, and in recent years naysayers have expressed a “bunch of baloney” denying that the Holocaust ever happened. It is your job, he told the young students, to tell your children that you have met Holocaust survivors and to keep their stories alive for future generations.
Jesus, a student who comes to Grossmont from Spain and Mexico, was one among several students who appreciated what the Schindlers were doing. “I think it is horrible that there are still people that don’t believe the Holocaust exists.”
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Dudley is a freelance writer based in Santee, California