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“I was not supposed to survive”
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Written by Sarah Parker, The Eagle Staff Writer
Mr. Denlinger, a ninth grade English teacher, just finished a unit with his class on the Holocaust. To finish the unit he had Moshe Baran, born in the 1920 and a Holocaust survivor, share his amazing story to Mr. D’s students on Wednesday, November 30. Mr.Baran started his presentation by giving us a brief lesson on Jewish history. He talked about Abraham and Sarah, Moses, and the reasons Jews celebrate Chanukah, then he gave us his background of his story, and finaly, we watched a documentary “A Look in the Eyes of Resistance”. This was very personal to me, because I myself am a Jew and have heard my own family’s survival story.
“My personal story is now a part of history”, Baran reminisced about his life during the Holocaust. “The Holocaust was not a part the war, it was during the war…A war is two sides fighting against each other, this was one side fighting and killing innocent children, women, and men”, said Mr.Baran’s belated wife in the documentary. Those memories are not kind.
It all started in his little hometown in Poland. When the Germans came, they announced that they had come to liberate them. The Germans claimed that Baran and his town were suffering and that they had come to help them.
Meanwhile, the police were now in power. They went to schools and told children to report their parents if they were speaking against the government. Jews were now ordered to wear the Star of David on the front and back of their clothes to separate them and make them known to others. The goal was to belittle the Jews as much as possible to make them seem less “human” and to bring down their esteem, to others, so they would be considered “animals”.
Mr.Baran told us that one day, it was raining heavily when Jewish men were taken to the marketplace, and forced to weed the cobblestone. Those who fought back were shot.
Mr.Baran and his family were sent to the Krasni ghetto shortly afterward,with only what they could carry, “The men (those who looked able to work), and the women, children, and elderly were separated, and during the liquidation, you could hear screams and cries. They machine gunned the people and set them on fire. All the children in my school perished in an inferno”.
The ghetto was blocked with three sides of barbed wire and the fourth side was a gate. They weren’t allowed to leave unless they were doing labor for the Germans. The Germans made the Jews in the ghettos collaborators to their “cause”. 300 families were to occupy 20 homes in the ghetto. There was no running water or plumbing.
But the ghetto was luxurious compared to the concentration camps. Baran worked and had access to the outside; he talked to the Russians, and told them he would get weapons because he wanted to join the resistance. He lost his father and sister in the ghetto, and his mother barely got out. She was rescued two days before the entire camp was slaughtered.
Mr.Baran was the “physical resistance” while his wife, who is no longer with us, was the “spiritual resistance”. At 15 years old, Moshe’s wife Malka, was sent to a concentration camp, where she worked on artillery. She lived in Poland before the Holocaust. She said that after the Holocaust ended and she was freed, “it was too painful to talk” about .
Malka talked about how some dealt with their pain through painting, theater, singing, but she expressed herself through writing. In the documentary she read some of her poems about her childhood, before the Holocaust. She talked about how she had two lives, one before and one after; she had no “life” during.
Malka told a story about how one night she heard sobbing in the bunker she was stationed at, and it was a young boy named David. All the women in the bunker loved him. He hid there, and he grew up in the concentration camp. One day their commander ordered an inspection and found young David.
He asked, “Do you want to go for a ride?”Of course, the boy didn’t know any better. All his life, he’d never seen the “outside world”, Malka and the others were shocked, they stood in place for what seemed an eternity. They were even more surprised when David came back, alive.
Another story she told us that really stood out to my classmates and I, was the story about the Barber. She was watching a documentary and she saw this man, who lived next door to her. He did her father’s and brother’s hair.
He was sobbing through the interview. All he could manage to say was that he cut the womens’ hair after they stripped down naked, which was the preparation to enter the camp to prevent lice and disease. He was so emotional and you could tell he had been through a lot of pain. He did Malka’s mother’s hair before she was sent to the camp, where she died.
The sad part was that he knew many of the women being sent to the camp.
At the end of the presentation Mr.Baran talked and provided us with words of wisdom, like “Instead of trying to change the world, change the world around you”, “Look at the world as a scale”, and “All of us we have a role to play, and I hope when the time comes you take advantage of it”.
Moritz is a nineteen year old, who came to the states from Berlin, Germany. He is serving a year of volunteering at the Holocaust center. His great grandparents were a part of the Hitler youth. Germans still have some guilt on the Holocaust, and at first many blamed only Hitler. All they wanted was to forget this period had ever happened, but in 1958 some said that they needed to take responsibility for what had happened and that they could’ve done more to help.
“Germany finally faced its path,” he said.
He feels like there needs to be “atonement” for what happened.
“I feel responsibility to engage,” Moritz said.
During his travels through Europe he saw the effect of the Holocaust on the communities in Europe.
Thanks to the efforts of Moshe Baran and Moritz, one can only hope that the Holocaust is a time period that will never be forgotten. It is mankind’s responsibility to remember and to ensure it never happens again.
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