By Dani Hemmat, Special to JTNews
d injustice, will you have the courage to speak out?”
The question, posed by Holocaust survivor Robbie Waisman, left an already rapt crowd in thoughtful silence at the North Kitsap High School Auditorium in Poulsbo. “When you hear an ethnic joke, will you speak up to say, ‘That’s not right’? Because that is how it begins.”
Waisman was speaking at Crossroads of Hope, a community event presented in tandem with an all-day Holocaust seminar for Kitsap Peninsula educators. Presented by the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center in cooperation with the North Kitsap School District, the two-day event also consisted of school assemblies and classroom presentations for North Kitsap High School students, as well as the public presentation from Waisman and Leo Hymas, a liberator of Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
Speaking to a packed auditorium on November 8, Hymas told the audience about his wholesome childhood on an Idaho dairy farm. The beginning of World War II meant rations came to his small town, but little else affected his idyllic life. That soon changed when he was inducted into the army immediately after high school graduation. Within a year, he was shipped overseas to assist in the Battle of the Bulge. Arriving to find that battle finished, his division was assigned to General Patton’s Third Army. He was among the soldiers that marched into Buchenwald and liberated the remaining 21,000 prisoners still there, most barely alive.
Although they did not meet at that time, one of those prisoners was 14-year-old Robbie Waisman. Taken from his home in Skarszysko, Poland at the age of 8, he lost all four brothers and both of his parents in the war. He cited many reasons for his own unlikely survival: his mechanical skills in the forced-labor munitions plant, other prisoners protecting him because he was a child, a guard’s mistake that kept him out of the gas chamber, and his own youthful insolence miraculously keeping him from a firing squad.
It was, however, the few years he’d spent with his family before they were interned that provided his greatest sustenance.
“Wonderful memories of home were instrumental to my survival, “ he said, recounting his loving family. “Friday nights, my father would read Sholom Aleichem stories. And, oh! My mother’s wonderful chicken soup. Had I known the extent of ultimate loss, I would not have survived.”
Although they were in the same camp on the same day in 1945, Waisman, a distinguished gentleman who carries himself with determination, and Hymas, his gentle, soft-spoken liberator, did not meet each other until eight years ago. Now dear friends, they both spend a great deal of their time traveling the world and speaking about their experiences of the Holocaust.
“I swore to myself I wouldn’t get captured, nor wounded. All I wanted to do was to put an end to that terrible evil. Whatever did that to all those people, those children — I vowed to end it,” Hymas said as tears welled up in his eyes, “I was there. I was a witness. You have heard me tonight. Now you are a witness, too.”
“If you were not there, it will always remain an abstract of unspeakable evil,” Waisman told the crowd. “Six decades later, anti-Semitism is manifesting itself in a most insidious form. We were naïve to think that the Holocaust would teach the world tolerance and understanding. But, look around you now. It’s still happening, and we still stand by — and do nothing.”
Both Waisman and Leo Hymas are frequent WSHERC speakers, but this was the first time they both spoke together in Kitsap County. It was also the first time that WSHERC has presented an all-day Holocaust teaching seminar in Kitsap and on the Olympic Peninsula, according to Ilana Cone Kennedy, director of education for WSHERC. Most seminars are requested in the I-5 corridor.
Kennedy notes teacher Stephen Pagaard as the “driving force” that brought the event out to Kitsap.
Pagaard, a North Kitsap High School history teacher and department chair, has been studying and teaching the Holocaust in-depth for most of his 28-year career. A Mandel Fellow at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and a recent recipient of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous’ national Robert Goldman Award for Excellence in Holocaust Education, Pagaard’s dedication to teaching history is as deep as his love of the subject itself.
“History is the most relevant class — it’s about human beings who are doing very real things. Sometimes noble, sometimes not, but always interesting,” Pagaard notes. “The more you get into [Nazi history], it’s a topic that easily lends itself to ‘values education’ — teaching kids to be more humane. I’m normally a little skeptical of these kinds of things, when teachers have political agendas or push their views on their students. The Holocaust is a very interesting topic, but it’s also one that kind of changes kids.”
Pagaard worked diligently with WSHERC to bring the speakers and the seminar out to area educators, and is pleased with the attendance. Aside from the educators, some Red Cross employees, college students and Jewish community members were among the 50 attendees at Friday’s seminar.
Hymas and Waisman had filled the North Kitsap High School auditorium to capacity the evening before, and Pagaard believes that the lessons learned from the Holocaust have a much bigger impact when the stories are told directly by survivors.
“It’s so much better for the students,” he said.
The hope, according to North Kitsap High School principal Kathy Prasch, is that the students will become the teachers. Prasch introduced the survivor and the liberator to the overflowing auditorium with a simple plea: ”You are the last generation to hear this firsthand. Now, it’s time to pay it forward.”