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Issues of Power and Powerlessness
Freda
p.12
Why
is it important that you share your story? Oh, it's very important.
It's very important that everyone should know about all
of these things.
Even now, even as we are sitting here,
I'm
sure you know there are Holocaust deniers. And when my generation
dies it will be a battle for the historians to be constantly fighting
to
keep this story alive. And it's important for people who are not
threatened by holocausts to know that this can happen to anybody. It
can happen
just because you're white and you have blue eyes, because maybe another
race has become more powerful. So if this is part of the human condition
it has to be told. And maybe in some way that story will have some
impact to change the human consciousness. All of the stories of Genocide
have to be told and everyone should know them.
Karl
p. 1
That's
my grade school classroom, in the years 1931 to 1932, and I am right
here at this corner. Now one other thing that I'd like to point out
on this picture is this. You see, after the Nazis came to power,
I
was pretty much isolated. I had to sit in the last row of chairs
in the room by myself, and the other kids didn't much communicate with
me or interact with me. They were all members of the Hitler Youth.
I became quite isolated. They made fun of me obviously as a Jewish
boy.
Karl
p. 2
I
remember a specific incident that happened, not in my school, but generally
in the town. A little over two months after the Nazis came to power
they instituted a Nationwide Boycott Day, on April 1st, 1933, where
by orders of the Nazi government, all Jewish businesses were boycotted.
That means they had the brown-shirted storm troopers standing outside
all the Jewish businesses. They scrawled graffiti on the walls and
on the show windows. My father had a retail shoe store and I still
remember - I was eleven years old - I still remember the storm troopers
standing in front of my father's store. The door was closed, the
business
was closed of course on that day, but I still remember the graffiti
scrawled on the walls and on the windows. That was the first big
indication, the first visible indication of the Nazi anti-Jewish policies,
which
I still remember.
Karl
p. 4
My
father had started his retail shoe business in 1920, two years before
I was born. Of course he had a tough time. But I was too young
to really
know much about that. Despite all that and several years later he
became very successful because he earned the trust of his clientele
- the
people who lived around there and people came and frequented his
store - even after the Nazis came to power, and told everybody not
to buy
from Jews. What people did, they waited until Sunday morning and
they came in through the back entrance to the store so that nobody
would
see them come in. My Dad would go to the store, on Sunday mornings,
and they would buy shoes from him, on the sly, so that they wouldn't
be seen.
Lucille
p. 1
You
mentioned that you were frightened the first day of school. Can you
explain that further?
I
was not frightened the first day, I was frightened right after Hitler
came to power. Because
the streets changed, the children changed,
everything
changed. I started school in 1930, so till '33 nothing happened.
It was just a normal walk to school, normal people. And after Hitler
came
to power, it took less than 90 days. People would call us names and
throw stones. And that was frightening.
Bill p. 3
I
was beaten up quite a few times. We couldn't go to school anymore at
one point so we went to a religious school in another town, we had
to go by train to the next town, it was about forty five minutes by
train. Of course then we had to wear the Star of David, you've seen
that with the "J" on it, and that came to Holland later on.
That's basically how I remember it.
I've
tried for many years not to think about any of that because I have
a good life here and I don't want my children to be affected, and some
of you know my children. It was very hard for me not to talk about
it and I never talked about it until they were about fourteen-fifteen
years old because I've seen that some of my friends talked too much
about it to their children and they messed up their kids. I was very
lucky that I had the will power and whatever else it took not to discuss
it with my children. I wanted them to be as normal as all American
kids are and they are.
Max p. 11
What did you think of the Kapos?
You
think good and you think bad, depends who they are. I mean, not all
of them are bad. Not all of them are good. They are all in-between,
like all people. They have power. Some of them use their power very
poorly. Some of them use their power to ammeliorate the conditions
that their fellow prisoners are in. It's not a hard fact that you can
say "All Kapos are bastards," because some Kapos did help
out. It depends what type of person that Kapo himself is and how he
wants to remain a Kapo in the sense that he is responsible to the person
in charge of the block, which is a fellow prisoner, because that's
how they all get assigned these duties.
Lucille p. 10
When you were in the camps, the ghetto,
and the cattle cars, did you get lonely at times?
Yes.
I felt lonely and I was alone, because there was no family, there was
nobody; there was no reminder from home. Not a piece of paper, not
a piece of clothing. Nothing. But my friend from the ghetto was with
me since the ghetto to liberation. Her mother died a couple of days
afterward. We were fairly close and we both knew that we had no control,
we had no way to change what was happening to us. And I don't think
it mattered to us anymore.
Lucille
p. 13
I
can't tell you what hunger is like. It is not if you don't eat for
a day. Or two days. It's if you don't eat for four years. It
is
something
that is indescribable. What does it look like to look at a German
with a drawn gun every day? I can't tell you that. There are no words
for
it. And the indignities we suffered, there are no words for those
either, because we were not treated as human beings. We were treated
as numbers,
sometimes not even numbers.
Issues of Power and Powerlessness
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