There are childhood memories so penetrating they run like movie reels in the mind’s eye, molding our character.
My vintage 8mm features my European-born grandmother turning tearful and tongue-tied upon mention of her family, lost in the Holocaust. Her heartbreak, and the gruesome photos I ogled in my parents’ edition of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” were literally mind-boggling.
When I was 13, Holocaust survivor Gerda Klein appeared in my biopic, helping me Think Again about the unfathomable.
Like a narrator, she recounted her death-defying odyssey from an idyllic childhood through ghettos, slave-labor camps and a three-month “death march” en route to liberation by the American officer who became her husband.
Her story teaches that hope is powerful and morality is a choice — even in the face of monstrous evil. Most importantly, bearing witness to good and evil is the way moral people deliver a better world to our children because, as fellow survivor Elie Wiesel stresses, “Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.”
Without memory, there also would be no freedom, as Klein movingly reminded the star-studded audience upon winning the Oscar for her documentary “One Survivor Remembers.”
Recalling that in the camps “winning meant a crust of bread and to live another day,” she urged the glamorous crowd to honor the memory of “those who never lived to see the magic of a boring evening at home” by returning home aware that those “who know the joy of freedom are winners.”
Boredom was a luxury in Nazi Germany, where a door knock could herald a Gestapo arrest. That was German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s fate after promoting truth to power and trying to hold the powerful accountable to truth. Executed near war’s end, his famous exhortation endures: “Silence in the face of evil is evil. … Not to act is to act.”
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