Holocaust survivor tells Aurora students her story

Holocaust survivor tells Aurora students her story

Robert Pore

Aurora — A history lesson taught by a survivor Friday is as relevant today as it was when the atrocities happened more than 75 years ago.

Bea Karp of Omaha is a Holocaust survivor. She and her sister survived the Nazi genocide of more than 11 million people in German World War II death camps, including 6 million Jews. Karp and her sister, Susie, survived, but 1.5 million other children were killed by Hitler and the Nazis.

Karp told her story Friday to the students of Rod Ruybalid’s Holocaust Studies class at Aurora High School. For more than an hour, she spoke of how Hitler’s Nazi thugs destroyed her family’s life, resulting in the death of her father and mother in Hitler’s death camps.

She and her sister survived because of the help of an organization of Jewish and French citizens who rescued them from their Nazi captors during their imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp in France.

She talked with the students and answered their questions from Omaha by computer via Skype.

The lesson about the Holocaust through Karp’s experiences was made possible by the Institute for Holocaust Education in Omaha.

The institute provides educational resources, workshops, survivor testimony and integrated arts programming to students, educators and the public. The IHE provides support to Holocaust survivors.

Ruybalid teaches social studies at Aurora High School. As part of the school’s global studies curriculum, he said, this is the first semester he has taught students about the Holocaust.

To teach the class, Ruybalid went through training on the curriculum and how to present the information to the students in an objective manner.

IHE’s goal is to ensure that the tragedy and history of the Holocaust are remembered, that appropriate instruction and materials are available to students, educators and the public to enable them to learn the lessons of the Holocaust in an effort to create a more just and equitable society.

“Hopefully, this (the Holocaust) won’t happen again,” Ruybalid said. “(The students) need to be in a situation where instead of being a bystander, (they will) be someone helping other people who are going through these situations, whether it be bullying at school or a situation where they see something that is an injustice.”

That was a theme repeated several times by Karp during her presentation when she asked where Germany’s non-Jewish citizens were when millions of their fellow citizens were being persecuted and murdered by Hitler, and why people and governments in other countries across the globe didn’t intervene during the mass genocide.

While the world has not seen the mass slaughter of innocent people on the scale that happened in Hitler’s Germany, Ruybalid said genocide still happens worldwide, such as in Rwanda, Cambodia and many other countries across the globe since the end of World War II.

For Karp, what happened to her family and other Jewish families from across Germany during the 1930s and through the end of World War II continues to be hard to comprehend. As she related, her dad was proud of his German heritage as his family’s roots in Germany went back to the 16th century. She said her father didn’t want to leave his homeland when Hitler began to persecute people of the Jewish faith. He believed that the people of Germany would rise up and put an end to Hitler’s insanity.

But that didn’t happen and her family and many other German families of the Jewish faith were taken from their homes, humiliated, beaten and then either forced into slavery or sent to concentration camps. She said people of the Jewish faith were made to wear the yellow star. Signs sprang up throughout Germany saying, “Juden verboten” (Jews forbidden), she said.

It was during those years of persecution, Karp said, that she learned something no child should ever have to learn — hatred that was directed toward her persecutors, who in one incident, as she recalled, had her being chased through the streets of the town where she lived after she tossed some pebbles at a couple Nazis.

“One of the pebbles hit them and they turned and came after us,” she said. “All of us ran and we escaped them in an alley. My mother, who had watched the whole incident from the living room window, was furious with us.”

Karp also related the incident when the Nazis came to her home and told her mother to pack their belongings quickly as they were being forced to leave their home to be relocated in a concentration camp in France.

As she grabbed her doll to take along with her, the Nazi who came to take her family away to a concentration camp told her that she didn’t need that doll where she was going.

Instead of leaving the doll behind for her Nazi captor to steal, she violently threw the doll to the ground, shattering its porcelain face across the floor.

The shattering of the porcelain doll was similar to an earlier story Karp told about the Night of the Broken Glass in November 1938 when Nazi thugs carried out a coordinated attack against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and Austria as German authorities looked on without intervening.

The name Night of the Broken Glass comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after Jewish-owned stores, buildings and synagogues had their windows smashed. Karp said her father ventured out that night to save precious religious items from their synagogues only to be beaten by those who were carrying out the atrocity against their fellow Germans.

In Karp’s account of that day during the Aurora class (which can be found at the Institute of Holocaust Education at http://ihene.org) she remembered how her mother became distressed when her father didn’t come home that evening.

“I still remember her pacing,” she said. “He never did come home that night. We learned he and other men had been rounded up and taken to Buchenwald, one of the worst concentration camps. I shall never forget the day he came home. He was covered with blood and mud. He was trembling. He was a sick man for a very, very long time and never quite recovered from his ordeal.”

One of the students in Ruybalid’s class is senior Jymmylee Samples.

“This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Samples said about hearing Karp’s story. “Since we have spent so much time talking about each factor of the Holocaust, that gave us an insight to what she went and survived through.”

When she listened to Karp’s account of her childhood during the years of Nazi terror in her homeland, she thought about her own childhood.

“I thought about any complaints I might have had then, but they couldn’t compare to what she had gone through and survived through,” Samples said.

For Amy Morris, a junior in the class, when studying about the Holocaust she has wondered how something like the Holocaust could have happened in the first place and how it could have gone on so long.

Karp told of many horrifying incidents that she and her family went through during those nightmare years. And for Samples, Morris and the other students in Ruybalid’s class, she had a message for them to take away from what she and her family had to suffer through.

“Never take things for granted, and make sure that we always live in freedom,” she told the students. “I wish you the very best and I hope you remember my story as there is much to learn from the Holocaust.”