3/4/2010
Youth learn from Holocaust survivor’s stories
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| Youth learn from Holocaust survivor’s stories |
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Clarice Keating
BEAVERTON — When Alter Wiener was 13 years old, German invaders shot his father and left the man to bleed to death. His mother went to identify the body three months later in a mass grave.
At the start of the invasion of Poland during World War II, Wiener was the same age as many of the young people who gazed up at him in rapt attention when he spoke at Holy Trinity Church here.
The stories Wiener told — of having 123 members of his family murdered at the hands of the Nazis, of surviving concentration camps only to carry the physical, spiritual and mental scars with him through his life — they were stories that would be difficult for any young suburban American to comprehend.
But middle and high school youth ministry coordinator Erin Nieves helped prepare her pupils for the experience. They underwent a safe simulation of the dehumanization process that occurred during the Holocaust.
When Alexa Fery, 12, arrived at Holy Trinity, she had no idea what was happening.
“We really didn’t even know what was going on,” she said about showing up at her regularly scheduled youth group meeting. “We thought it was a joke, but then they told us we couldn’t laugh.”
When they arrived, teens were “relocated” to the cafeteria for “processing.”
According to Nieves, the cafeteria represented the entrance to the concentration camp. Each student was assigned a number, which was “tattooed” on their arms with washable marker, and for the remainder of the experience, they were to be referred to by their number only. All personal belongings were confiscated, and they were given an old T-shirt uniform to wear for the rest of the evening, with no regard to size or color. Then they were sorted by gender to be sent to “camps” or “crematoria.”
Wiener was 15 when he was deported to his first labor camp. His brother had already been in that camp for a year, and when they were reunited, Wiener didn’t recognize his own kin. He said his brother had aged 10 years in that one year.
“It was one of the most traumatic experiences in my life,” he said of seeing his brother.
When Wiener was freed at the war’s end, he weighed 80 pounds. Four months after liberation, he was back to 120 pounds.
Every day, when Wiener steps into the shower in the morning, he thinks of how his 9-year-old brother must have felt being forced into the gas chamber where he died.
But he also remembers his heroes during the war, like a German woman who risked her life every day for 30 days to sneak a cheese sandwich to him in the factory where they worked. If she had been caught, she would have been executed.
“This German woman will be my hero to the end of my life,” he said.
She taught him that stereotyping is absurd.
“You can find good and bad people in every group,” he said.
Fery said it was difficult to hear Wiener’s story.
“It was so sad, and we couldn’t picture how it would be because it was so big and harsh,” she said. But now, she said, she thinks of those who starved in the camps when she sees hungry and homeless people in the streets, and she wants to help them.
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