EDITORIAL: 'It happened ... it can happen again'
Feb. 2—Well done, McDonald County schools.
McDonald County history teacher Jonathan Holz recently organized what could be a life-changing lesson for his students and for the community 80 years and a half world removed from the Holocaust.
After taking students to the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education in Kansas City — something we believe every history teacher should consider doing, by the way — he invited one of their speakers, Erika Hornstein Schwartz, of Springfield, to talk to both his school and then to the community.
Holz told this paper: "It is important for us to know where hate and bigotry can lead us. But also because her story didn't have the happiest beginning but she didn't allow that to define her entire life."
Her father, Hermann Hornstein, and 10 members of her family died in concentration camps or by their own hands to prevent discovery of relatives by the fascists who participated in the Holocaust.
Not only did she tell her personal story of growing up a Jew in Hungary during the Holocaust, she also helped students realize that she rose above it.
"I spent the first 44 years of my life seeing myself as the victim of circumstances," she told the students.
Then, she said, "I realized that happiness or lack of happiness might just be in my mind. I could find joy in my day or misery. I could see only the bad or I could seek what was good. It was a choice."
Today there are fewer than 250,000 Holocaust survivors left, and we applaud McDonald County for taking advantage of this opportunity to make history real for its students and the local residents.
In that same vein, we applaud Joplin residents Mary Anne Phillips, Paula Callihan and Paul Teverow, who have been researching the stories of Henri and Horst (Fred) Taucher, two orphaned Jewish boys who managed to hide from Nazi arrest and survive the Holocaust, and who ultimately made their way to Joplin after the war
Their family had lived a peaceful life in Berlin until rising antisemitism led to attacks on Jews. Their father's business was one of those destroyed on Kristallnacht, "the night of the broken glass."
More of their story can be found online at the Holocaust Center for Humanity archives at https://www.holocaustcenterseattle.org/survivor-voices/25-survivor-encyclopedia/443-fred-taucher.
In an interview, Taucher said "Hitler formed that cancer and infected the rest of the nation."
Do you think it could happen anywhere? he was asked.
"Yes."
We pray that lesson of that time is not lost to future generations.
"It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere."
So wrote Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor, in "The Drowned and the Saved."
