By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
Three local Holocaust survivors told their stories to a group of international scholars at a three-day conference on Christian teachings about the Jews. Robert Herschkowitz, Thomas Blatt and Henry Friedman spoke in the symposium entitled Christian Teachings About Jews: National Comparisons in the Shadow of the Holocaust.
The conference took place at Pacific Lutheran University in September and was co-sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Dartmouth College and Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, a scholarly German journal for contemporary church history. Robert P. Ericksen, professor of history at PLU, organized the conference.
“I give lectures at Seattle University, Bellevue Community College and Edmonds Community College, and I loved every moment of this conference,” said Herschkowitz, a child survivor from Belgium and vice president of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center. “The three of us all spoke, one after the other, for about 15 to 20 minutes each. There were many questions from a lot of religious people, professors and ministers, many who have their own churches.”
“The first time I heard Professor Ericksen speak against the Church I was very much impressed with him and the work he is doing,” said Henry Friedman, a Washington State Holocaust survivor, president emeritus of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center, and author of I’m No Hero: The Journeys of a Holocaust Survivor. “He has been one of the leaders in the Northwest community. He’s really an expert and has written many books on the subject.”
WSHERC not only helped in the organization of the survivor speakers, but also helped make the conference available to teachers in the local community.
“We helped Pacific Lutheran University by identifying which survivor would be good for this particular cause,” said Miriam Greenbaum, co-director of the Center. “We also worked with PLU to give teachers college credit for being there so that teachers who don’t get this opportunity to hear from scholars could get college credit from PLU. Dr. Ericksen said, ‘I’m opening this up for you to do that.’ He’s a very special person. We’re glad to see that someone at the university level can have an impact on teachers and the community.”
While university scholars, survivors and teachers were sharing information about the Holocaust with each other, around 30 so-called Holocaust deniers picketed and handed out flyers in the lobby of the Washington State Historical Museum, where the conference was being held.
“The deniers were standing there and they had signs that said, ‘Israel has nukes,’” said Herschowitz. “The German guests and scholars were very upset and asked, ‘How could you let them do this because in Germany they would be arrested for doing this?”
Friedman became a Holocaust speaker only after returning from a trip to Washington, D.C. in the 1980s, where he first saw deniers and could no longer remain silent. He felt his mission that evening had been effective.
“I was surprised that they would have the gall, the chutzpah, as we say, to come to where all of these knowledgeable people are and make a statement like this,” Friedman said. “These are young people,” he added. “It is up to the survivors to carry this message on.”
Friedman was one of a hundred survivors out of 15,000 people in his village. Christians in his community risked their own lives to save his life and help him. In Friedman’s presentations, he touches on two main points: a person should never give up and each one of us can make a difference.
“Life is worth living,” said Friedman. “Tomorrow will always be better. The quest for life is never to give up. And the Christian people who saved our lives by risking theirs were not indifferent. Many people were indifferent because they were greedy for our possessions, but they were not indifferent.”
On the way back from the conference on the bus that transported the three speakers, the driver, a young woman, told Friedman she could now tell others that she knows the Holocaust really did happen. For Friedman, that was all he needed to hear. It’s exactly what he set out to do.