Holocaust survivor took center stage during week of campus observances and events

FIU concluded its 11th Annual Holocaust & Genocide Awareness Week today. Twleve events honored the power of testimony, truth and human dignity.

Nearly 700 students, faculty, staff and community members attended programs produced in collaboration with Hillel at FIU, the Holocaust & Genocide Studies Program at the Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs, the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU and the Office of Public Policy Events.

The Remembrance Ceremony proved a particularly moving gathering. It began with remarks by Oren Baruch Stier, director of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program and a professor of religious studies, and featured a conversation between Holocaust survivor Anita Karl and journalist/filmmaker Leslie Gelrubin-Benitah.

Born in 1928, Karl shared her story of being forced with her sisters and parents into the Lodz ghetto in their homeland of Poland in 1941, along with thousands of other Jews, many transported there from Germany. A tighly sealed area, it became a prison. Karl's mother would go on to plan an audacious escape that invovled obtaining false papers that stated the family's religion as Catholic. That evenutally allowed them a chance to go into hiding in a local village and, after the war, to travel to Peru before moving to the United States.

By the end of 1942, nearly 205,000 people had passed through the Lodz ghetto. It is estimated that only a few hundred survived the war, with as many as 67,000 having previously been moved to a concentration camp in Auschwitz and perishing there.

Gelrubin-Benitah is herself a descendent of Holocaust survivors and has worked to capture and preserve the testimonies of the dwindling numbers who still remain through her award-winning multimedia project, The Last Ones. She has filmed more than 200 individuals across multiple continents and languages. Her grandfather also made it out of the Lodz ghetto.

Karl shared how she was required to wear the yellow Star of David on her clothing and lived surrounded by barbed wire and regularly wintessed killings. She also spoke of what she received in daily food rations: a single cup of water and a small piece of old black bread, which she made last for 24 hours. She recalled not just hunger but her fear of the soliders, all much better dressed for harsh winter than she. And she spoke spoke of her extended family of nearly 200, loved ones she knew before entering the ghetto. None would live.

“Today’s remembrance is of the blackest day in the history of humanity,” Karl said. “The Holocaust assaulted our way of life as Jews and all of us as human beings. The Nazis made lampshades from our skin, mattresses from our hair and fertilizer from the bones of those killed in the concentration camps.”

In the audience, Fabian Ramos, an international relations student said he had never before heard a Holocaust survivor tell their story and found it “very emotional.”

He asked Karl what motivated her to come to campus and how she was able to continuing living with all that she had seen at so young an age. Karl responded that she is driven to honor her six million murdered brothers and sisters.

“I cannot allow that their lives were spent in vain. It is my duty and sacred obligation to speak about the Holocaust,” she exaplined. That personal commitment goes back for Karl to the 1950s, she explained, when she attended college in Missouri and was frequently invited to serve as a guest on radio programs. In that way, listeners came to understand the reality of what had happened on the other side of the world.

In response to another question, Karl spoke of more recent situations that have given her pause - among them those in Cuba and Venezuela, Iran and the Oct. 7 attack in Israel - all of which confirmed that humankind has not yet learned from its mistakes.

She spoke of her hope that people might one day resolve differences with conversation rather than with war. And she reminded everyone that studying history is the only way to not repeat it.