SE speaker addresses lessons of Holocaust
by Jessica Petty, reporter

     Approximately six million people, 1.2 million of those under the age of 12, lost their lives in the prejudice-based Holocaust that lasted from 1939 through 1945, a leading speaker and Holocaust researcher told SE Campus students and faculty last Thursday in SE Campus’ Roberson Theater.

     Detailing the chilling story of Holocaust survivors and victims, Mark Pollick presented sobering pictures and accounts of the Holocaust’s effects on the cities of Prague, Warsaw, Vienna, Budapest and Amsterdam as well as on the country of Israel.

     Pollick showed slides from The Journey of Conscience, a trip through Holocaust history that he guided for 20 students and a Holocaust survivor.

     The educational and often emotional trip consisted of visits to concentration camps, Holocaust museums and memorials throughout Europe.

     During a trip to the deadliest concentration camp, Auschwitz, the students witnessed the impact of Nazi rule on Jewish life.

     Rooms were piled to the ceiling filled with shoes, eyeglasses and suitcases of the victims as well as rooms that held millions of deadly gas canisters used to kill the prisoners.

     One room in particular proved especially moving for the students. That room was filled, but it held only human hair that the Nazi army used to make blankets for their troops.

     Pictures of victims and Pollick’s stories of what they endured were nothing compared to the experience of Bertha, the survivor who accompanied the students.

     Herself a survivor of Auschwitz, she added a more personal aspect to the educational travel experience. At the time of her imprisonment, she was much younger than the students who took the historical journey with her. She was 12 when sent to Auschwitz, where she remained for two years.

     Both of her parents and her younger sister died there. She said that she survived only because of the unthinkable job to which she was assigned.

     “She was given an extra crust of bread a day to take the bodies of the deceased out from her barracks that had died during the night,” Pollick said.

     When Bertha and the students visited Auschwitz, she remembered immediately which barrack was hers.

     She showed her travel companions the two-by-three foot ledge that she shared with five other girls for two years.

     Afterwards, students toured the gallows outside of the army cafeteria where prisoners were hung and the nearby arch that reads “Arbeit Macht Frei,” meaning work makes you free.

     Pollick argued that actions of the engineers of the Holocaust could not be blamed on idiocy.

     “Education could not have prevented the Holocaust; smart people were inventing crematoriums, and doctors were conducting experiments on men, women and children,” he said.

     Pollick believes that 45,000 people a day could have been saved if the Allied forces had bombed the railroads used to take Jews to the concentration camps.

     Many people around the world were taught, for whatever reason, that the Holocaust never occurred and that the stories and people involved were western propaganda.

     Pollick insisted that the truth about the Holocaust and its aftermath needed to be understood.

     “What I want people to go away with is that when good people do nothing, evil people can do everything,” he concluded.