The Hagaman Memorial Library will be hosting the exhibit, Memory and Legacy in April 2011. The exhibit tells the story of the New Haven Holocaust Memorial,and local Holocaust survivors. The Library will be the first public library to host the exhibit, shown below. Currently the exhibit is being shown at Quinnipiac University. A summary of the opening will give some idea of the opening cermony program the library plans to hold through the Greater New Haven Holocaust Memory Inc.
Keynote speaker Mira Binford told her story of survival in Poland. Survivors such as Irm Wessel, one of the last Kindertransports children to leave Germany, and Helena Rosenberg who camouflagued her identity as a Catholic nurse, along with others placed a white rose in a vase on the podium. Survivors were accompanied by students from the “Adopt a Survivor” program which pairs a survivor with a student for a year.
John L. Lahey, Quinnipiac University President, (shown below at right) opened with welcoming remarks speaking of his visits to the Holocaust Museums in Washington, Jerusalem and Miami Beach:
“I walk through those exhibits and the history and the pictures all I can think of even to this day there are people… the president of Iran… “that think nothing of getting on a national or international stage and deny that the Holocaust even occurred…. And so it is extremely important that if its never going to happen again, we have to make sure that we have these memorials. We’re blessed this evening to have some the survivors here… at some point we won’t have the first-hand accounts and in the future who knows what the historians may write or what political figures may decide to rewrite history- therefore these memorials, particularly for the worst disaster in human history, the Holocaust, the attempted annihilation of an entire people, that these memorials need to be multiplied as many as you can have in as many communities.. and have gatherings like this where people can come together …to hear the first hand accounts of people who experienced it. “
Rabbi Reena Judd, Quinnipiac University Rabbi stated, “When experiences are shared, distances are shortened and understanding is enhanced. The words spoken, the pictures shown and the stories hereby shared, serve to illustrate the enormous distance we can travel apart from our fellows when we forget the humanity which is within us all…”.
Fay Sheppard of the Greater New Haven Holocaust Memory, Inc. (photo below left) gave a history of the Memorial. She shared the story of European Holocaust survivors who thirty-four years ago reviewed their past and came to the conclusion that -“We have nowhere to mourn our dead. We have no where to say the prayer for the dead the Kadesh. And we’d like to make sure that the memory stays intact that we think of our relatives our lost ones…our brothers and sisters our mothers and fathers…”
Ms. Sheppard continued the story of how the Survivors knocked on the Mayor’s door- at that time Mayor Logue- and said “We are new immigrants here in America and we don’t really know how the system works, but we hope that the city of New Haven would assist us. And we would like to put up some type of memorial…”. "I will tell you” said Ms. Sheppard, “ the City of New Haven, with a handshake made a pledge to help these survivors of the Holocaust. There was never a written document, never any fancy paperwork and the Mayor picked out the plot of land.” New Haven continued to be faithful in its support of the Memorial.
Keynote speaker, Mira Binford,(photo below) Professor Emerita, began her story of survival with a startling comparison of the number of children in Poland before the war and after.
“I was born a Jew in Poland in 1938…that was the year before the German army invaded Poland…. Poland before WW II had approximately a million Jewish children …six years later 5000 children in Poland itself, to be fair some had fled to the Soviet Union and survived there…that works out to be half of one percent.”
Ms Binford told that her parents had also survived, but 34 members of her extended family were murdered. After hiding in a bunker with no food Ms Binford and her parents were, in 1943, captured and put into a local slave labor camp.
Her parents threw a letter with a photograph of her and a plea to save her over the wall of the camp. On the other side of the wall were two Christian women, who with a nod of the head, decided to take her. And Ms. Binford was let down over the wall as well. One of them was an “amazing loving woman” who after a few months died of cancer. Ms. Binford fell into the care of the woman’s husband, who she later came to think of as “my own private nazi” even though politically he was anti-Nazi, had worked to save Jews and was in hiding for political reasons. She stated it was:
“...a year of terror for me – not only from fear of the Nazis, but fear of the man I came to think of later, when I was grown up, as my own private Nazi. He was my first teacher. He taught me how to read and write and at the age of six he taught me how to add and subtract fractions. And I made mistakes. And he beat me with one of his collection of rubber and leather whips …and I would cry. The cruelty was in that when I cried, he trained me and when he would snap his fingers, I had to laugh. So I learned to laugh at my own pain.”
Ms. Binford’s mother escaped from an Auschwitz death march and had the address where her daughter was staying. At the time of the liberation from the Russian army someone called to her mother that the Russians were about to execute the man who had been Ms Binford’s rescuer. The Russians were also going to execute the man’s son. Ms Binford’s mother worked to persuade the Russia officer that the man and his son were not collaboraters but had saved a Jewish child. It took all night but the Russian Officer was finally persuaded to spare them.
Only two days ago a German school teacher attending a conference on the Holocaust- and a relative of Ms. Binford’s rescuer- found Ms. Binford through the Internet. He wanted details, not as one would expect of his relative’s’ heroism in saving Ms. Binford, but rather of how Ms. Binford’s mother saved her daughters rescuer! The purpose of the Holocaust Conference the teacher was attending was how to make the lessons of the Holocaust applicable and how to use them for education and democracy in the schools. Of this coincidence Ms. Binford stated “I’m very glad this connection was made.” She drew her talk to a close with a lesson:
“The most important lesson that I learned from him was one that I didn’t realize for many, many years. And that was that you don’t have to be good to do good… that ordinary people- any of us- can make a difference without being saints- that you don’t have to be good to do good.”
Volunteer President Doris Zelinsky (photo right) and member Fay Sheppard of the non-profit Greater New Haven Holocaust Memory, Inc., provide the energy to keep the exhibit touring and keep the Memorial in repair. The New Haven Holocaust Memorial is located in New Haven’s Edgewood Park at the corner of Whalley and West Park Avenues. The memorial was designed by architect Augustus J. Franzoni. It consists of a base forming a Star of David from which rise six shafts that curve inward toward one another in a sense of enclosure, representational of the barbed wire enclosures of the concentration camps where six million Jews were killed under the Nazi regime. Ashes from Auschwitz were placed on the site by a survivor at the dedication of the site in 1977. The Memorial is shown in the photograph below.
The traveling exhibit, Memory and Legacy echoes the appearance of the Memorial. It traces the development of the Memorial from idea to reality incorporating personal stories of survivors.
The aspect of legacy is not only in the exhibit’s visual and audio (audio station) presentation, the legacy is grounded in the reality of memory handed from elder to younger through the Adopt a Survivor Program. In this rigorous program students are paired with survivors for a year in order to learn preserve and present to others the memories survivors commit to them. Ms. Zelinsky states “The student absorbs the survivor's story and creates a poster capturing the survivor's life and family. These posters are stories of loss but they are also vibrant with their tale of renewal and reestablished lives in our community”. The posters are displayed with the exhibit.
Ms. Zelinsky worked for Mayor Logue in 1976 when the Holocaust survivors enlisted the Mayor’s assistance in establishing a memorial She encourages educators and students to view the exhibit for its teaching potential and to raise awareness to the dangers of prejudice. She states:
‘’None of us realized then that we were creating the first Holocaust Memorial constructed on public land in the United States. And, it was built solely through private funds and support- - small contributions gathered "door to door", the volunteer efforts of the owner of Cheshire Landscaping, Marvin Cohen and his good friend, architect Gus Franzoni, and the support of the Mayor, and the Board of Alderman as well as the expertise in outdoor settings of the Parks department personnel.
Through the years, both Fay and I have been asked to chair the citywide commemorations held each April around Holocaust Memorial Day. As children of Holocaust survivors, we have both taken on this responsibility as part, almost, of something one does for family.’
The exhibit is currently on display from 8:30 a.m to 8:30 p.m in the Arnold Bernhard Library at Quinnipiac University 275 Mount Carmel Avenue, Hamden. In April, the Hagaman Memorial Library in East Haven, will be the first public library to host the exhibit.
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