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Home » Survivors » Sonia Schreiber Weitz>Boston Globe

Boston Globe Article 4/8/07

She remembers the horrors so others can't forget

A Holocaust survivor sees some repetition of the past

By Steven Rosenberg, Globe Staff | April 8, 2007

Twenty five years ago, Sonia Weitz and Harriet Wacks had a dream to educate the North Shore about the Holocaust. They had little money and few sponsors, but what drove them was a vision to teach the lessons of history, and the need for tolerance and respect in society.

In 1982, denial of the Holocaust was growing, and Weitz decided that after years of public silence, it was time to speak out. Weitz survived five Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. She and Wacks, a fellow Peabody resident, began locating area Holocaust survivors and asked them to tell their stories. With a small grant from the Jewish Federation of the North Shore, they created the Holocaust Center Boston North, based in Peabody.

Their first major event was held on a rainy spring night in 1982. Weitz walked into the Jewish Community Center in Marblehead, where some 150 people had gathered for the area's first public Holocaust Remembrance Day. There was silence when about 25 Holocaust survivors moved to the center of the room and placed lit candles on a long table to remember those who perished.

After Weitz placed her candle with the others, she stood at the podium and began a poem in honor of her mother, who died in the Holocaust. "Where is your grave? Where did you die? Why did you go away? Why did you leave your little girl that rainy autumn day?" she asked.

Weitz has since become a nationally known speaker and author who was appointed by President Bush in 2002 to the US Holocaust Memorial Council. The Holocaust Center Boston North now has 3,000 books, videos, and DVDs that can be borrowed by the public at its permanent home at the Peabody Institute Library. And, on Wednesday, it will mark its 25th Holocaust Remembrance Day at Peabody High School at 7 p.m. Boston-area musician and daughter of Holocaust survivors Rosalie Gerut will perform, and the Gordon College Women's Choir will sing during an interfaith memorial service.

As they do every year, local survivors will hold a candle-lighting ceremony, but in recent years their numbers have dropped from more than 20 to fewer than a dozen. The dwindling number has not slowed Weitz, who speaks as many as 100 times a year to students, educators, clergy, public safety officials, and civic groups. Working alongside Wacks, she also helps coordinate human rights days and interfaith teen projects throughout the state.

"As we go on, each year there's more urgency because of everything around us," said Weitz, who was born in Krakow, Poland, and liberated by US troops in May 1945 at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. She was 16, and suffering from typhus.

"Years ago, I used to proclaim with conviction, 'Never Again,' and I don't anymore because I feel that we have failed to learn enough from this history and we're repeating some of the same horrors as before," she said.

Wacks, who has devoted much of her professional life to the holocaust center, said that educating people about genocide has changed lives. "As long as anyone is deprived of their human rights, none of us can be free," she said.

"I believe that learning about the Holocaust and applying the lessons of the past to our everyday lives is empowering. Those coming to the center and hearing survivors speak realize that they too can and must make a positive difference in their world. The alternative is unthinkable."

Malden's Alan Brown said speaking about the Holocaust provides a catharsis for the memories he endures. "It is bittersweet. It's bitter, but sweet in the sense that I hope it does some good," said Brown, 79, a former college economics professor who grew up in Hungary.

Brown's world changed in June 1944 when his mother, grandmothers, grandfather, and aunt were taken to Auschwitz and killed. Brown and his father were brought to the Neuhaus Nazi labor camp in Austria to dig ditches and tank traps. On the day that the Russians liberated the camp, his father died, and Brown dug the grave with his own hands.

When Eric Kahn speaks, he brings pictures of his childhood Jewish friends who were taken from their homes in 1942 and killed at concentration camps. "For many years I did not talk about my experiences during the Holocaust. Then I realized by keeping silent I was negating the very existence of my dear friends and relatives," said Kahn, who is 77 and lives in Swampscott. Kahn grew up in Wiesbaden, Germany, and survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Weitz, 77, who has no plans to slow down or retire, hopes that one day second- and third-generation relatives of Holocaust survivors will help lead the center she helped create. she often doesn't sleep the night before or the night after she speaks, and she finds the Holocaust Remembrance Day one of the hardest days of the year.

"Walking down with that candle is really hard; you have to be made of stone not to feel it. It doesn't get any easier," she said.