LYNCHBURG, Va. (AP) - Never forget.
These are two of the most commonly uttered words when it comes to the Holocaust.
Liberty University students Jared Brim and Tim Moraski said they plan to do just that after a recent experience they said has touched them in a way they never expected.
During an LU Send trip to Israel over Thanksgiving break, the students filmed “Remember,” a short documentary about the Holocaust, for community service credit.
Now, six months later, their short film, which featured Holocaust survivor Judith Rosenzweig, has been added to the Visual Center at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust museum and remembrance center, as part of its digital film library.
“It’s more humbling than anything else for these gentlemen,” said David Welch, executive director of LU Send, which oversees all of the university’s travel programs.
“They weren’t aiming to have their name recorded in history or anything along those lines. All they wanted was to complete their project with excellence. They wanted to put the work in to show these precious people they stand with them and they support Israel.”
Before beginning this journey, Brim, a sophomore film major, and Moraski, a senior studying business project management, said they knew very little about the mass genocide during World War II that took the lives of six million Jews and an estimated five million non-Jews.
This is not surprising, as many U.S. states do not require their school systems to teach about the Holocaust or other genocides.
A new study released April 12 - the same day the world commemorated Yom HaShoah, known in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day - revealed almost half of U.S. adults could not name any of the more than 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos in Europe during World War II. The same study also noted 66 percent of millennials did not know what Auschwitz was.
“The more we further our knowledge of the Holocaust and keep it in our consciousness, the better chance we have of molding a world free from prejudice, hatred and crimes against humanity.”
Meeting and interviewing 88-year-old Rosenzweig at the Haifa Home for Holocaust Survivors, the assisted-living facility in Northern Israel where she lives, gave Brim and Moraski a different perspective.
“In school and in books, I feel like you learn about it in terms of numbers,” said Moraski. “. But when you meet someone, it’s a real life, it’s a real person. It’s real stories. . They had kids, they had parents. It becomes a lot more real instead of in terms of stats. It’s a name. It’s a face.”
Born in 1930 in what was then the Republic of Czechoslovakia, Rosenzweig was 9 years old when the Germans arrived and the occupation began. In 1942, Rosenzweig, then 12, and her family were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto-labor camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia and transferred to Auschwitz two years after that.
Auschwitz was liberated in January of 1945, but Rosenzweig, as well as her mother and sister, had already been transferred a few weeks earlier to Bergen-Belsen in Northern Germany; Rosenzweig’s mother would die one week after they were liberated from the concentration camp that April.
After the war, Rosenzweig moved to Israel and became a nurse, though she returned to her home briefly with her sister, where they found their brother and learned of their father’s death.
Rosenzweig did not voice her experiences in the Holocaust for the next 40 years, she told Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster, in a 2017 interview, only deciding to speak up when she learned of those denying the events ever took place.
“We owe it to the victims and survivors that their witness will be kept alive in the memory of people so that it will never ever happen again.”
Since then, she has traveled across the world sharing her story in speeches, classrooms and her memoirs.
“These stories should be heard even when we are not any more alive to tell them,” Rosenzweig told the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, which runs the Haifa Home, recently in response to news of the film’s inclusion in Yad Vashem.
Listening to Rosenzweig was emotionally exhausting, Brim and Moraski said. But what struck them more than her story of survival was the joy she continues to keep inside of her, even after seeing the darkest parts of humanity.
“She was talking about when it was all over for her and she immediately went to school to become a nurse for (newborns),” Brim said. “She was so happy talking about all the children she got to give life to and hold. It was nice to see that someone who could go through that experience could come out of it and still feel happy about things.”
In addition to meeting Rosenzweig, Brim and Moraski interviewed representatives from several Israel-based organizations that work to aid Holocaust survivors, including Haifa Home for Holocaust Survivors, the Helping Hand Coalition and the Jerusalem Institute of Justice, and spoke with them about their work.
“All the organizations came from different roles, whether it was financially helping them, legally helping them, but they all have hands-on experience helping survivors,” said Moraski of the five institutions profiled in the film. “From each organization we were able to get a different perspective of things and a different story.”
Some of the organizations, like the Helping Hand Coalition and the Haifa Home, also have connections to the Christian faith, something Welch said he thought was important for Brim and Moraski to explore in their project.
“Right now, there is a very evident shift within the evangelical, Christian community away from supporting Israel and even viewing the Jewish people as part of God’s plan. We see that most evident among the millennials and younger,” he said.
Working on the film gave “them a tangible example of what Christians can do to show that they love Israel and they love those people.”
The overall project took two and a half days of work during their 12 days in Israel and then a couple of weeks’ worth of editing when they returned to the states.
It wasn’t until January that Brim and Moraski heard from Yad Vashem, which they visited during their trip, about its interest in adding their 40-minute documentary to its archive of approximately 11,200 films - the largest catalog of films about the Holocaust.
Since its establishment in 2005, the Visual Center at Yad Vashem has focused on “collecting and studying every piece of relevant footage, film, television and visual testimony related to the Holocaust,” Liat Benhabib, the visual center’s director, wrote in an email this month.
The goal, she wrote, is not only to gather as many of these films as possible, but to make them available for public viewing, from full-length dramatic features, television specials and historic newsreels to artistic shorts, home videos and more than 60,000 taped testimonies of survivors.
“In the last half a century, film has become a central medium through which we learn about the world and form our perceptions about personalities, places and events,” Benhabib wrote, noting that film is especially crucial when educating today’s young generation.
” . The more we further our knowledge of the Holocaust and keep it in our consciousness, the better chance we have of molding a world free from prejudice, hatred and crimes against humanity.”
Brim and Moraski said “Remember’s” inclusion in the memorial’s digital archive validates their work, but, more importantly, it completes Rosenzweig’s wish to have her story survive her.
“It’s unreal,” said Brim. ” . It’s a little intimidating to me, personally, that it’s in there for educational reasons and people can actually look at it and learn something. It’s a bit much to think about right now.”
The biggest take-away from the entire experience, Brim and Moraski said, was learning how much help still is needed both in aiding survivors but also in preserving their testimonials, especially as memories fade and birthdays pass.
“In another few years there will be no witness of the Holocaust alive anymore,” Yudit Setz, deputy director of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem’s humanitarian arm, which was mentioned in the film along with Yad Vashem, wrote in an email.
“Now, already, there are many voices in the world that say it has never happened,” Setz wrote. “We owe it to the victims and survivors that their witness will be kept alive in the memory of people so that it will never ever happen again.”
While organizations like those mentioned in the film, testimonies like Rosenzweig’s and projects like “Remember” have made the mission of keeping the atrocities of the Holocaust within the public consciousness, there is still more that can be done.
“Survivors are still in Israel. They’re still here, all over the world, and they still need help,” Moraski said. “I feel like a lot of people don’t know that or ever get told that. There’s things people can still do to help.”
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Information from: The News & Advance, http://www.newsadvance.com/
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