Satellite on Jewish historyĪri Folman who also spoke during the day of online commemoration, is the son of Holocaust survivors who met and married in the Lodz ghetto. “We have to remember it, and we have to act in accordance with the lessons that we have learned from it”, stressed Professor Bauer. The professor warned that it was “a precedent” that can be repeated, “so, when we deal with mass atrocity hate crimes today, with genocides today, we need to start from the Holocaust…not just for remembering but acting in accordance with the history that we are witnesses of”. “Jews were intended to be annihilated all over the world”, not only in Europe, he said. “It’s very easy to get immersed in the day-to-day, but there are a lot of things that are happening around us and it’s really important to speak up”.Īccording to Israeli Professor, Yehuda Bauer, the Holocaust was an “unprecedented genocide…because of its global form”.
“We have to continue and be awake and act,” she said. Since the late 1980s, she has been teaching students about the Holocaust and the lessons she learned during those traumatic years, affirming the need never to become numb to what is happening in the here and now. Butter acknowledged that it took 40 years before she was able to follow the guidance of Elie Wiesel, who considered that providing testimony and bearing witnesses was the “duty” of all survivors. “I’ve lived in the United States ever since and was lucky to take advantage of so many opportunities.” Speaking outĭr. “I was separated from my mother and my brother for eighteen months before we were reunited in New York to start a new life”, she said. Separated from her family, the then 14-year-old was sent to a refugee camp in Algiers for almost a year, before arriving in the US in 1945. “But then, sadly my father died on the train to Switzerland and when we arrived in Switzerland, my mother and my brother were hospitalized immediately”, she recalled. “First a German concentration camp in Holland, and then to Bergen-Belsen in Germany because my father had managed to apply for Ecuadorian passports thinking that that might save our lives”.Īfter one grueling year in Bergen-Belsen, their Ecuadorian passports enabled them to be included in a Nazi-administered prisoner-exchange programme. “We were deported to two concentration camps”, she said. Butter told of how her family fled to Amsterdam to escape the Nazis, but just two years later, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, and the “persecution of the Jews escalated”. “We have that responsibility to be active citizens, to confront hatred, and to confront the violations of our democracy and in that way, it can be preserved and protected”, she said.
“It is up to us, to the people, to preserve and protect our democratic institutions and our Constitution”, she stated, which is why she believes that everyone in the US needs to be educated about what took place during the Holocaust, from those who survived it.
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