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hawkwing_lbOne of our lecturers arranged a talk this morning, from a Holocaust survivor. It was... impressive.
Tomi Riechental is a short man. He doesn't look seventy: he's more like a grey-haired fifty-five. But he was born in Slovakia in 1935, and in 1944 was deported to the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen, with his mother, his brother, and some others of his family. Eight months later, at the end of the war, Riechental and his immediate family were among the few survivors, and Riechental himself didn't speak out about his experiences for over fifty-five years. Because, as he said, he just couldn't. It was too terrible.
He told us about the men and women who looked like walking skeletons, with their skin stretched tight over their bones. About the bodies in the dead of winter, piled outside the barracks in their dozens, in their hundreds, frozen, decomposing. About the hunger and the unrelenting horror.
And about the duty he feels now, with so many of the older generation dying off, to speak and bear witness to what he has seen, that it may be remembered. That it may never be repeated.
At the end, we stood. We applauded. We showed our respect the only way that was in us to do, and I was left feeling that it wasn't enough.
I'll remember that short, soft-spoken man speaking with a guttural accent of things that seem so divorced from that white-walled, sanitary seminar room for the rest of my life. Because, as he quoted, the horror of the Holocaust is not that it is beyond human capacity. The horror of it is that it is within human minds to plan, and human hands to carry out, genocide on a continent-wide scale.
*
In other news, today was a good day. I attended lectures and the gym. I ran, and did weights, and almost achieved a respectable pull-up.
Life is sometimes more forgiving than I expect it to be.
Tomi Riechental is a short man. He doesn't look seventy: he's more like a grey-haired fifty-five. But he was born in Slovakia in 1935, and in 1944 was deported to the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen, with his mother, his brother, and some others of his family. Eight months later, at the end of the war, Riechental and his immediate family were among the few survivors, and Riechental himself didn't speak out about his experiences for over fifty-five years. Because, as he said, he just couldn't. It was too terrible.
He told us about the men and women who looked like walking skeletons, with their skin stretched tight over their bones. About the bodies in the dead of winter, piled outside the barracks in their dozens, in their hundreds, frozen, decomposing. About the hunger and the unrelenting horror.
And about the duty he feels now, with so many of the older generation dying off, to speak and bear witness to what he has seen, that it may be remembered. That it may never be repeated.
At the end, we stood. We applauded. We showed our respect the only way that was in us to do, and I was left feeling that it wasn't enough.
I'll remember that short, soft-spoken man speaking with a guttural accent of things that seem so divorced from that white-walled, sanitary seminar room for the rest of my life. Because, as he quoted, the horror of the Holocaust is not that it is beyond human capacity. The horror of it is that it is within human minds to plan, and human hands to carry out, genocide on a continent-wide scale.
*
In other news, today was a good day. I attended lectures and the gym. I ran, and did weights, and almost achieved a respectable pull-up.
Life is sometimes more forgiving than I expect it to be.
