Intolerance, bullying and racially motivated nastiness are everywhere you look these days, both cinematically and in real life: the smash-hit film The Hunger Games, about a dystopian future society where children battle to the death; shootings in Oklahoma and Florida that may have been racially motivated; the new documentary Bully, which opens Friday.
The Hunger Games features scenes where heroine Katniss, starving in what used to be America, sneaks outside her district’s fence to hunt game for her family.
Seven decades ago, Max Glauben was doing the same sort of thing in real life: At 13, in the 1940s, he crept under the walls surrounding Poland’s Warsaw Ghetto, where he and his Jewish family were forced to live under Nazi rule, to find food. Ghetto residents were rationed 184 calories’ worth of food per day; the average non-Jewish German ate more than 2,500 calories per day.
Glauben, now 84 and a Dallas resident, is one of about 120 Holocaust survivors who call the Dallas-Fort Worth area home. On weekdays, Glauben and fellow survivors donate their time — not to mention their emotions and memories — to the Dallas Holocaust Museum/Center for Education and Tolerance in downtown Dallas, talking with schoolchildren and other visitors about their experiences.
Visiting the museum this week was one of the most moving and thought-provoking hours I’ve ever spent in a Dallas venue. My timing was accidental, but fortuitous — Holocaust Remembrance Day is April 19. A heart-wrenching exhibit called “Every Child Has a Name” has been extended through April 30 and possibly longer (if I were you, I’d get there soon; you don’t want to miss it).
The show spotlights replicas of toys and artwork from children who were interred at the Terezin camp in the current Czech Republic. The artwork was buried in two suitcases at Terezin by a teacher shortly before she was sent to Poland’s Auschwitz death camp, and was discovered later. The original pieces are at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem, a center dedicated to education and remembrance of the Holocaust.
A simple pencil drawing called “Teacher and Pupil,” by artist Rudolf Lowry (age unknown), shows a teacher meanly chastising a Jewish student. Both students and teachers harassed Jewish students during the 1930s. Another small piece — a bright, happy watercolor of trees and flowers called “Memories of Home (Sunbathing)” — is by Ruth Cech, who was 11 when she arrived at Terezin. Only about 100 children from the camp survived; the fates of Rudolf and Ruth are unknown.
The museum, which has been open for about six years, is already outgrowing its 10,000-square-foot space on Record Street; the land behind The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza (next door) has been purchased for a new Holocaust Museum, with fundraising about to begin and a possible opening five to six years in the future.
The current museum includes artifacts such as prisoners’ personal items, prison uniforms, photos, documents and an actual boxcar that was used to transport prisoners. I got chills from the small pile of sad, beat-up little shoes worn by children in one of the camps. In the somber memorial room, a small vial of ashes from the Majdanek camp is surrounded by names of survivors and those who perished, many with Dallas connections.
More than 50,000 people visited last year, many of them schoolchildren from this area, although the museum also gets lots of kids from Oklahoma, Louisiana and as far away as Alaska and South America. The museum is one of 17 such sites nationwide, with several more around the world.
The Dallas museum is small enough to go through in an hour or two, but it’ll have a big impact. No matter what you think you know about the Holocaust — the systematic murder of 6 million Jews as the result of Hitler’s quest for so-called Aryan purity — you’ll learn something new.
For instance, I thought all Holocaust prisoners were tattooed with the numbers we’ve all seen in movies and other media. Not so; numbers were issued only at Auschwitz; prisoners at other camps were given initials or other identifying marks.
The museum’s permanent exhibit centers around one important day in the Holocaust: April 19, 1943. On that day, the 20th train from Switzerland to Auschwitz was stopped and more than 200 prisoners were saved; at the Bermuda Conference, leaders from the U.S., Great Britain and Russia met to discuss the “German problem,” and basically decided to do nothing; and an uprising began in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Anti-semitism was rampant in Europe and the United States, so sympathy for the Jews’ plight was hard to come by. Lest you think things have changed, the Anti-Defamation League issued a press statement on March 20 — that’s March 20, 2012 — citing a study that finds that “anti-Semitic attitudes in 10 European countries remain at disturbingly high levels.” In the United Kingdom, for instance, anti-Semitic attitudes jumped to 17 percent of the population, compared with 10 percent in a similar 2009 study.
What about us? A poll released in November found that anti-Semitic stances have also risen in the U.S., with nearly 15 percent of Americans (some 35 million adults) holding “deeply anti-Semitic views,” an increase of 3 percent from a 2009 poll.
If that’s not reason enough to visit the Holocaust Museum, I don’t know what is. You’ll come out wanting to heed ever more strongly the words of Albert Einstein: “The world is too dangerous to live in — not because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who sit and let it happen.”
Free screenings of the short film series Why We Remember, produced by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, will be shown April 13-15 from 2 to 4 p.m. in the museum theater. Screenings are free, but visitors must pay regular admission if they wish to also tour the museum. (regular price to tour museum). Films include Voices of Reason, One Survivor Remembers and Defying Genocide.