Sonia Schreiber Weitz, a Polish Jew, chronicled the horrors of her experience in the Holocaust through a series of poems. The first poem she read at Wednesday’s All-School Meeting, titled “Take a Giant Leap of with Me,” commented on the unspeakable, unthinkable nature of the Holocaust. “I come from another world. I come from a universe where my people were condemned to death, for no other reason than they were Jewish. Of course, not all of the victims were Jews, but all of the Jews were victims,” she said. For Weitz, the Holocaust terrors began on September 1, 1939, when the Nazis invaded her hometown of Krakow. “It was the beginning of the end,” she said. The Nazis immediately required Jews to wear the armband exhibiting the Star of David, confiscated Jewish businesses, including her father’s, and closed Jewish schools. “People began to disappear,” she said. Her uncle Henry, who dabbled in politics, was the first victim in the family. Later, when her aunt received an urn with his ashes, “back when the Nazis still notified people of deaths,” she witnessed her father’s tears for the first time. “I guess the thought process was, ‘if you arrested the doctors, the lawyers, and the priests, the rest would follow,’” she said. “At first, they took away only the young, the old, and the sick,” Weitz continued. Though she was not yet 14, her parents obtained false documentation which prevented immediate separation. Then the Nazis built the walls to create the Krakow ghetto. When Weitz’s mother was taken to the concentration camp Belgist, she said “promise me that you will tell,” a plead that prompted a poem and consequently her book “I Promised I Would Tell.” “I promised I would tell the world, but where to find the words to speak of the innocence and love… It can’t be told,” she read from her poem. The rest of the family was then sent to Plashov. At the time, it was not yet a “death camp” because it lacked crematoria and gas chambers. Instead, the Nazis shot the Jewish prisoners on a hill and threw the bodies into a ravine, where the bodies were burned. To this day, the smell of burning bodies haunts Weitz. The 9/11 attack on the twin towers in New York invoked these memories and prevented her from sleeping for several days, even though she was hundreds of miles away in Peabody, Massachusetts. She shared a brief anecdote of her time in the Plashov concentration camp, how the commander used the Jewish prisoners as target practice. Her “first experience with death” came when Weitz, her sister Blanca, her friend and her friend’s mother were building a road with the stones of the cemetary. The commander, displeased with the way her friend’s mother was working, told her to run and shot her down. Weitz was transported to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp next, where 10,000 people a day were gassed. She remembered standing in line naked, “waiting to be chosen whether to live or die.” “The Germans made up their minds. They were going to kill every last Jew,” she said of the “death march” to Bergen-Belsen, the camp where Anne Frank died. During her stay in Auschwitz, Weitz wrote another poem after a memorable experience with her father. She had snuck into the men’s barracks, where a boy was playing a harmonica, a crime punishable by death in the camp. Weitz’s father said to her, “You and I never had a chance to dance together. So let us dance, for we may not have another chance.” Like the other prisoners in the concentration camp, Weitz contracted typhus during its rampage. Despite the lack of food and water and the crowded barracks, she survived. “All I remember,” she said, “was my sister worrying about me and trying to keep me alive.” This was just weeks before the end of World War II. Weitz wrote “The Black Messiah” in honor of her liberator, the African-American soldier who had saved her and Blanca from the concentration camp. The two sisters, along with Blanca’s husband, were the only survivors in the entire extended family. She noted that, although the leaders of the other countries knew of the Nazis terrors, the soldiers were “completely unprepared for what they saw.” She stressed learning from history – using the example of not only the Holocaust but the little-known Armenian genocide of the First World War and from the world around us today. “Rwanda… never should have happened, and Darfur makes me very upset,” Weitz said. Weitz advised students to refrain from becoming bystanders. “There is no such thing as an innocent bystander,” she said. “There is nothing lonelier for a victim than to feel abandoned.” Will Lindsey contributed reporting.
