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NEVER FORGET – Roxanne Pappenheimer, left, stands by her mother, Beatrice, at the Central Middle School Monday, after the elder woman recalled life in a Nazi concentration camp in France for school students. Mrs. Pappenheimer said she speaks out about the Holocaust whenever possible to urge others not to forget.
WALTHAM – Beatrice Pappenheimer may remember more about her child than most adults do.
Beginning in 1940, when Pappenheimer was 8 years old, she was imprisoned with her parents and sister for nearly two years at a Nazi concentration camp in southern France.
“I think it’s very imperative,” Pappenheimer told students at the city’s Central Middle School Monday, “that we should remember never to forget.”
At the invitation of her daughter Roxanne, a special needs teacher at Central, Pappenheimer spent several hours sharing her memory of the Holocaust with students.
“Six million Jews died and their only sin was they were Jews. That’s one of the reasons I feel I have to talk about my experience,” Pappenheimer said.
A resident of Omaha, she said she is frequently impelled to speak about the Holocaust so later generations will never forget.
“They always listen. I’ve never had a disorderly class,” she said after Monday’s assembly at the school.
When Hitler’s storm troopers burned synagogues in 1938, it wasn’t Pappenheimer’s first taste of the anti-semitism that swept through her hometown of Karlsruhe and the rest of Germany before the start of World War II.
Gangs of grade-school students frequently taunted her with cries of “dirty Jew” and “Christ-killer” as she walked to and from school each day, she said.
An uncle had warned the family to leave Germany, but Pappenheimer said they were discouraged from doing so by the difficulties of severing their roots and learning a new language somewhere else.
It was after her father returned home battered by a stint of forced labor at Buchenwald that two gestapo officers arrived at the family’s small apartment and forcibly took them to the train station.
Along with hundreds of other Jews, they travelled for three days without food and water to Gurs, a concentration camp in southern France.
Pappenheimer said the mud surrounding the camp still sticks out in her memory.
“The whole camp looked brown, black, and grey,” she said.
The men and women were separated, and her father was taken to a camp nearby. The women were stripped and searched. The Nazis tore their teeth out if they were filled with gold.
Pappenheimer’s mother wore gold-pierced earrings. They were ripped from her earlobes. “To this day, I can hear her cry out,” Pappenheimer told the students.
Fifty people were assigned to a barracks and given a loaf of bread to divide amongst them for food each day. There were no utensils, containers or running water.
Her mother “became so skinny I could see the bones.”
The family was later transferred to Rivesalts, another concentration camp, where Pappenheimer said she and her sister were released, along with other children.
It was the last they ever saw of their parents, who were later taken by the Nazis to the death camp at Auschwitz in Germany, where they were killed.
Asked afterwards about her feelings about President Reagan’s visit Sunday to a military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany, where 49 SS members are buried, Pappenheimer said, “I think it was wrong for him to do this.
Reconciliation, she said, should not come at the “expense” of remembering the war crimes of the Germans.