Holocaust survivors share their stories with thousands of students to 'try to prevent it from happening again'
Much of Khaya Matusevich's family was killed in the Holocaust. At 12 years old, she fled Minsk and was separated from her parents.
She found them two years later, having escaped from an orphanage in Uzbekistan where she was about to be sold for marriage.
Matusevich, now 94, has been writing a memoir, but she's never told her story publicly before.
So on Thursday evening in a Whitefish Bay banquet hall, when staff from the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center approached her and asked if she'd be open to sharing her experience with students, Matusevich's answer was simple: Yes.
"It never should repeat," she said of the Holocaust, according to her daughter, Svetlana Goberman, who interpreted from Russian.
The majority were Jews from the former Soviet Union, like Matusevich, who came to the U.S. in the 1980s and 90s. Most have never spoken publicly about their experiences. But as the population ages, Holocaust educators believe it's increasingly necessary to document their stories for future generations.
"We are down to our last survivors," said Samantha Abramson, executive director of the education center. "We know that our time with them is limited. Yet the message they're showing and sharing with us is so important."
Two years ago, a Wisconsin law mandated that students in grades 5-12 must learn about the Holocaust. The education center, known as HERC, helps teachers with that curriculum. A key offering is its speakers bureau, a group of about 30 Holocaust survivors and their children who speak to classes across the state.
Over 9,000 students have heard survivors' stories, Abramson said.
In a first, the education center partnered with Jewish Family Services, an agency that resettled many refugees from Soviet states in Milwaukee and continues today to provide case management, translation help and other services. It was a chance to reach a new population of survivors. If they weren't open to speaking to classes, center staff told them, their stories could be filmed and shown to students, or documents or letters they had from the war could be studied by students.
"Anytime I meet a new survivor, I think of all the hundreds of students that could be impacted by their stories," Abramson said.
Matusevich was among 60-some Holocaust survivors who gathered at the Harry and Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center to learn more about how the education center records survivors' stories. Organizers said it was the largest gathering of Holocaust survivors in the Milwaukee area in recent years.
It's also a chance for survivors to know they're heard, said Kevin Boland, vice president for programs and services at Jewish Family Services. Some from the Soviet Union don't think they "count" as survivors if they weren't taken to forced labor camps — even as they fled the Nazis and their family members were killed, he said.
"It's important for our survivors and the community to know that we give a damn" about who they are and what they went through, Boland said.
Each survivor has a unique story
A roomful of Holocaust survivors means a roomful of stories.
There was Vladimir Kheyfets, who came to the U.S. in 1994 from Ukraine. He was 4 years old when World War II began. His father was killed defending their city, and he fled with his family to Kazakhstan, then to the Ural Mountains in Russia. He returned to Ukraine when the war ended and came of age behind the Iron Curtain.
"People never forget. It's a horror. They have been through hell," Kheyfets said, as interpreted by case manager Tatiana Forrest.
Today, he's a proud great-grandfather to a 3-year-old boy.
There was Nancy Kennedy Barrett, who carries forward the stories of her now-deceased father, a Holocaust survivor, as she speaks to student groups.
"Unfortunately, it can happen again. And I don't think I could live with myself if I didn't do everything I could to teach about what happened in the past, to try to prevent it from happening again," she said.
And there was Eva Zaret, 86, who has told the story of her life to thousands of Wisconsin students.
"I just go out and talk to kids (and tell them) not to bully, not to hate. Because hate brings more hate. I want to make sure that love and kindness is alive," she said.
Zaret's father and most of her relatives were killed by the Nazis in Hungary, many shot and dumped in the Danube river. She was 7 years old in 1944 when she and the other Jews in Budapest was forced into a ghetto with horrific conditions, where she became very ill. The dead were piled in the streets.
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She recalls being freed from the ghetto and going with her family to the Carpathian Mountains to heal. Zaret got married at 17 and had her daughter at 18, then found herself again in the middle of conflict. Soviets violently crushed the Hungarian Revolution, an uprising of Hungarians protesting Communist rule.
Zaret, then 20, and her husband ran through cornfields to Austria, her baby daughter in her arms, their only possessions the clothes on their bodies. For three days, she stood in a line for refugees in Vienna.
An Austrian woman saw Zaret in the line, her baby crying, and motioned for her to follow. The woman cut her own bedsheet into pieces for diapers and gave her food for the baby.
"That restored the human feeling in me that people are also good, not all bad," she said.
To thousands of children, she says: We have to love each other and care about each other. You are the future; be kind. Until she dies, she says, she'll keep sharing that message.
Zaret views ongoing war and ethnic cleansing around the world with concern.
"It shouldn't happen again, to any people. We are all created in the image of God," she said.
She also disagrees strongly with the recent bans on books in schools and libraries, seeing echoes of Nazi book burnings.
"It's the most important thing to learn about history," she said. "You learn something from every book."
Survivors' stories a 'critical weapon' against hate
The education center is seeking to bring more survivors into its speakers bureau as antisemitism surges locally and nationally.
Nationally, Jewish people are the most targeted faith group, according to the FBI. They are the victims of more than half of religiously motivated hate crimes, while making up only 2.4% of the U.S. population.
"Every Holocaust survivor's story matters," Abramson said. "Every personal testimony and unique experience is a critical weapon in fighting against Holocaust denial."
The survivors also model for students forgiveness and courage, Boland said.
At the end of the night, survivors gathered for a group photo. Beneath their gray hair and smiling faces, an important history linked them. They were a testament to the past, and a guide to the future.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin Holocaust survivors share stories to fight antisemitism
