Our View: Remember the Holocaust

Fanny Gelernter's story of Nazi crimes against humanity is so powerful because she is alive to recount the horrors. Gelernter spoke in Erie on Sunday for Yom Hashoah, the annual service to remember the 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust.

If you didn't hear Gelernter's talk, you can still pause to remember Holocaust victims by visiting a special exhibit at Congregation Brith Sholom this week. The exhibit, "The Courage to Remember," is on loan from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. The center is named for a death camp survivor who devoted his life to hunting down Nazi war criminals to bring them to justice.

Gelernter, who now lives in Pittsburgh, was liberated from the Stuffhof concentration camp, near Gdansk, Poland. Her late husband, Simon Gelernter, survived internment at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. With her daughter, Fairview resident Mimi Waldman, Gelernter joined in the candle-lighting ceremony to remember Holocaust victims.

"I'm not making up a story. I saw it with my own eyes," said Gelernter, as she described mothers forced by the Nazis to choose which of their children would live and which would die. Some women weren't even given that inhumane choice. The Nazis "would take the baby, throw it in the air and give a command to the German shepherd to rip it apart in front of the mother," said Gelernter, the keynote speaker for the memorial program, sponsored by the William and Frances Schuster Cultural Fund of the Jewish Community Council of Erie.

As Holocaust survivors age, it will be less common to hear such first-person accounts. Fanny Gelernter said there are estimates that her generation of Holocaust survivors will be gone within the next decade. In a Sunday Washington Post story, Emily Langer and Ellen Belcher wrote about Andra and Tatiana Bucci. The Italian sisters were sent to Auschwitz at ages 4 and 6 with their mother, who disappeared at the camp. Now 73 and 75, the sisters are among a small group who retain memories of the Holocaust as young children; most children deported to Auschwitz were killed. "They can still recall the pebbles that became their toys and the hard wooden bunks where they slept with dozens of other children, most of whom would die. They remember the piles of corpses and the foul mud that, they later surmised, contained human ashes," the story said.

The Wiesenthal poster exhibit preserves a story that must never be lost. This is a story of unspeakable horrors, but also of the power of the human spirit. The 40 posters cover the Nazi rise to power in Germany and throughout Europe, Hitler's "Final Solution" to exterminate the Jews, the liberation of the death camps and the trials for war crimes. The exhibit ends with this quote from Wiesenthal: "Only know that hope lives when people remember." The free exhibit is open today and Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Brith Sholom, 3207 State St. (You can enter through the Jefferson Educational Society doors.)