Holocaust Survivor Speaks to U. City Students

April 8 was Holocaust Remembrance Day. That seems to be lost on some in other parts of the country. A mom in Michigan thinks “The Diary of Anne Frank” is too “pornographic” for middle school reading. While in Albany, New York a teacher is being disciplined for assigning a Nazi propaganda essay on why Jews were evil.

Reading stories like these in the news make me glad to live in U. City where diversity and knowledge are celebrated. 

Instead of controversy, our students heard a remarkable, first-hand account of the holocaust from Sara Moses, one of the youngest children to survive a Jewish ghetto in Poland and two Nazi concentration camps.  Ms. Moses barely survived the concentration camp and was eventually reunited with her father and they immigrated to St. Louis.

On April 12, Ms. Moses shared her story with classes at the middle and high schools.

Sara Moses visited with Brittany Woods Middle School students
and shared about her childhood experiences in a World War II
concentration camp.

My seventh grader was privileged to hear Ms. Moses speak. In his words, it was “life-changing” to hear her story. Until meeting Ms. Moses he had only read about the holocaust in books. Hearing her speak brought history to life and have him greater empathy for those that suffered like Ms. Moses. He also said it gave him a better understanding of the cruelty that took place and emphasized the importance of being kind to people.

 

Holocaust survivor Sara Moses spoke with University City High
School students in Eleanor Aboussie and Michael Daly's classes.

 

How fortunate our students are to have such rich experiences as part of their academic studies.

 

Below is a story from the Idaho Mountain Express which tells some of Sara Moses' story.

 

Holocaust survivor tells her story
Imagination and extra food from a Nazi guard kept Sara Moses alive

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Wednesday, October 12, 2011

By TERRY SMITH
Express Staff Writer

Sara Moses says she survived Nazi concentration camps by using her vivid imagination and because of the generosity of a female Nazi guard.

Now 73, Moses was a 6-year-old Jewish girl when she was separated from her family and taken from her home in Poland in 1944.

"Out of necessity, I developed a rich, strong, imaginary world that helped me to survive the horrors that were to come," Moses said Friday at the Community School in Sun Valley. "I used what I had. I had my hands. I imagined that the fingers on my hand had faces. I gave each one of them names. My fingers became my family."

Moses is one of few children who survived the horrors of the concentration camps.

Moses now speaks throughout the United States about the Holocaust. She said she is willing to revisit the horrors of her childhood because "evil-doers grow bigger and stronger when they are surrounded by people who say nothing."

"The reason I speak, why I go back to those times is so that lessons of the Holocaust, not just the Holocaust, but the lessons of the most horrible genocide in history will not be repeated," she said. "If we don't learn from the past, it will be repeated."

Moses was only a 1-year-old child when Germany invaded and conquered Poland in 1939. She and her family were forced into the Jewish ghetto in her hometown of Piotrkow. Her mother was taken and killed in a gas chamber when Moses was 5. At the age of 6, she and the rest of her family were rounded up by the Germans. She was separated from her father and other male members of her family and taken first to the Ravensbruck concentration camp near Furstenberg, Germany, and later to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Saxony.

She was found barely alive when British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen in April 1945.

An estimated 3,600 women worked as guards in German concentration camps throughout the Third Reich. About 60 of them stood trial for war crimes after the war and 21 were found guilty and executed.

The fate of the Nazi guard who helped Moses is unknown, but Moses said she would not likely have survived without the extra food the woman gave her.

Moses said she met the guard at Ravensbruck. She said the guard "looked her up and down" and finally told her that she looked remarkably like her own daughter. Disease at Ravensbruck was killing most of the children.

"She was bringing me her food when she could," Moses said. "Looking back, I believe that this little food she gave me, gave me the chance to survive, a chance that the other children didn't get. The very first to die were the youngest children."

Moses told stories about witnessing "brutal violence against my people" and about her earliest memories of "living in fear."

"I remember walking in a line of people, carrying a little bundle with Nazi guards watching us on either side with guns."

She described a train ride in a cattle car: "It seems like we were on the floor of that train for days, without food and water. Many people died."

At Bergen-Belsen, Moses said, she remembers "seeing a skeletal person living on the floor across from me chewing on a dry bone—I was envious, I wanted that bone."

Thousands died at Bergen-Belsen, either in the gas chambers or from diseases that ravaged the concentration camp.

"We had to lie on the floor among the dead and dying bodies," she said. "This was the lowest point of my life."