Isabel Lawrence
News Editor
Ms. Judith Altmann shared her experiences of living in and surviving the Holocaust at the annual Holocaust Assembly. The assembly took place on Thursday, Oct. 11, and was attended by all grades.
Today, nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, it is important to remember the event in order to prevent its recurrence, especially with fewer survivors. Richard Webb, head of the history department, stressed the need for students to remember the Holocaust. “As many learn in global history and AP world history, genocides are cyclical, they will happen again, this is not a lost, forgotten, historical moment,” he said. “It will happen again, the Holocaust is not a one off genocidal event.”
History teacher Ms. Jennifer Fine recognized the significance of the Holocaust specifically as compared to other events in history. “We’ve had other genocides, but [in the Holocaust]they’re building camps, and buildings, and gas chambers, and crematoriums. Just a horrific extermination of people,” she said. “It really has to be remembered so we hopefully never ever see it again.”
In order for students to remember the Holocaust, guest speaker Judith Altmann was brought in. Ms. Altmann was a teenager when she and her family were moved from Czechoslovakia to concentration camps, the most famous being Auschwitz. In order to spread awareness, Ms. Altmann is part of a network of fellow Holocaust survivors who speak to students about the tragedy.
This year was not the first year Ms. Altmann has come to NCHS to spread her message, and her experiences prove to make an impact every year. “You can read as much as you can, but when you hear it from a person who went through it, it’s so different,” she said.
Ms. Altmann was 14 years old when her life changed forever. She told the story of the day after Passover at six AM, when two Hungarian and two SS guards to their house, telling them, “You have a half hour, take all your money, all your jewels, enough food for a day, and come.”
From there, Ms. Altmann and other Jewish families were loaded into train cars to be transported to numerous labor camps. According to Ms. Altmann, the train ride proved to be one of the worst experiences. “But what was the worst part,” she said, “People went berserk. They were and screaming and they were hitting other people.”
On May 21st, a date Ms. Altmann said she would always remember because it was her father’s birthday, the train stopped at Auschwitz, where she was greeted with a sign reading “Work will liberate you.” Auschwitz was one of the most brutal and widely known concentration camps during the Holocaust, and was where the infamous “Angel of Death,” Dr. Joseph Mengele, worked.
Ms. Altmann described the state of perpetual fear she and others lived in during their time at the camps. After being stripped naked and having their heads shaved, Ms. Altmann and the girls her age were sent to the showers. “You go to the shower every week. But the big fear is is it water coming down or gas?” she said. “In our case it was water coming down. In our parents’ case, it was gas.”
Even when Ms. Altmann was transported from the camps to small towns where she and other girls worked, life did not get any easier for her. “We prayed that the bombs would come because we could no longer endure,” she said.
Despite all the horror she underwent, however, Ms. Altmann survived, and remains optimistic about the future, encouraging students to always live to their full potential. “Think for yourselves. Don’t go with the mob,” she said. “Cherish the freedom and see to it that it should stay here forever.”
Ms. Fine sees how Ms. Altmann views the world positively. “Her outlook on life is just amazing given what she’s been through,” said Ms. Fine. “And she talked about that a little bit, how she’s just not filled with bitterness which I find amazing after having been through that. I think it’s a wonderful message that you can go through something so terrible, and yet still have such a wonderful outlook on life and still have a wonderful life.”
Ms. Altmann emphasized the fact that she is not at all bitter or vengeful towards those who caused the Holocaust. “I was not left with that bitterness because I say to myself, ‘God spared me,’” she said.
From surviving the Holocaust to being able to retell her stories today, Ms. Altmann continues to spread awareness about the Holocaust. “The fact that we have somebody from World War 2 still alive, that can share in a peppy, energetic fashion and in a humanistic, kind fashion, after what she was through the Nazi horror of the Holocaust, and talk about the loss of her family,” Mr. Webb said. “This is an extraordinary human being.”
