The Endurance and Relevance of Survivor Testimonials in the 21st Century

By Sylvia Taschka
A blog series by students of the Fall 2024 ‘Nazi Germany’ class under the direction of Professor Sylvia Taschka of Wayne State University. In partnership with the Appelbaum Family Compass Fund.

Just like the students in my Nazi Germany history course at Wayne State University, I also once sat in classes on this dark chapter of history while pursuing my university degree. However, my deep interest in the subject long preceded my academic studies.

I must have been about 13 years old when I truly began to realize the shattering magnitude of the Holocaust. Growing up in Nuremberg, Germany, the Third Reich was never just a distant historical event for me. It was my city that had hosted the annual Nazi party rallies, my hometown that the infamous 1935 race laws had been named after, and it was in Nuremberg where the first trials against some of the leading Nazi criminals took place. But only in my early teens did I begin to understand that—as the German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt once said in a conversation about the Holocaust in 1964—“something happened here that we still are unable to come to terms with.”

A Search for Holocaust Understanding

The first person I turned to with all my questions and despair was my mother. She recommended books (I devoured them all) and when that alone did not satisfy my thirst for understanding, she contacted a friend at work, who had close connections with Holocaust survivors. Soon, I had a new pen pal from a Kibbutz in Israel. His name was Benni and he did not tire to answer any questions I sent his way.

Benni came from Allenstein—now Olsztyn—, a small town in East Prussia. After the Nazis came to power, Benni’s parents did not want to leave Germany, the country they regarded as their home and for which Benni’s father had fought during World War I. Still, they became increasingly worried about their young son and decided to send him to Denmark to protect him from Nazi persecution. From there Benni eventually made his way to Palestine. His parents did not make it out of Germany in time. Not one of Benni’s relatives survived the Holocaust.

The Importance of Human Stories

Being pen pals with Benni was the first of several encounters with Holocaust survivors I would have over the following decades. There was the lovely man, who came as part of a reconciliation effort by the city of Nuremberg and told me during a quiet conversation that he had no hesitation meeting with Germans of the post-war generation, but, when he saw someone older, he first had to know what they had done or not done, before he could agree to shake their hands.

Through a local history organization, I met a woman, who needed help editing her deceased husband’s memoirs about their expulsion from Nuremberg as well as their forty years in exile and their ultimate return to Nuremberg, a city her husband could never stop loving, despite it all.

Another meaningful moment was when I sat with a survivor in a school cafeteria in Connecticut, where he was in charge of providing hot lunches to all of Norwalk’s public schools. Decades earlier, he had to flee Nuremberg’s neighboring city Fürth. He appreciated the reconciliation efforts being done back in his old home, he explained to me, but he would still never be able to set foot in Germany again.  

Educating the Next Generation

What these encounters all had in common was that each of them turned the general history of my country into the lived experience of an individual. An individual, whose demeanor I could take in while they were sharing their stories and whose pain became visible in things like tone, gestures, and facial expressions. Nothing else was more powerful in teaching the meaning of ‘never again’ to me. To this day, this remains a lesson I aim to pass on to my students at Wayne State University.

This term, I was thrilled to cooperate with The Zekelman Holocaust Center to fulfill that goal. The people at the Center provided us with a database of various testimonials by Holocaust survivors with a local connection to the Detroit metropolitan region. My students watched these interviews and chose one to respond to in a blog. Their task was not just to summarize the fate of the person they listened to but to specifically think about what they had learned from the experience that they did not know before. I also encouraged them to tell us a bit about their reaction and to include any remaining questions they might have.

The Relevance of Survivor Testimonials

I am so pleased to be able to share with an interested public the results of this endeavor: The series The Endurance and Relevance of Survivor Testimonials in the 21^st Century consists of nine blogs written by my students. The students’ responses include a wide range of fascinating reactions. One of them now appreciates “the luxury that it is to have a family that surrounds my kitchen table.” A former family practitioner shares how he was prompted to reflect on his patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, many of whom had lived through World War Two. Another student decided to write a poem that beautifully illustrates the impact the words of the testimonial had on her.

Parallels with ongoing suffering in today’s world also preoccupied the students: this story “resonates deeply with me,” one wrote, “as today many of my fellow Muslims in faith around the world are facing similar persecution and are also forced to flee the unsafe environment of their home countries to find a better life elsewhere.” That intense feeling of hoping to prevent similar crimes in our present and future similarly shines through, when another student implores the readers “to explore what is left of Marianne’s home and try to conceive of what can be lost to hate and brutality.”

Students and Their Responses

The blogs also include many questions. Students want to know more about these stories of survival, endurance, devastating loss, and how one can nevertheless still have some hope left at the end.

Holocaust survivors are dying out, and most of them are no longer around to pass on in person the lesson of their historical fate. But, as this project shows, their testimonials will remain and continue to resonate with us. They will prompt us to ask questions. And as the famous French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once rightfully said, “The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions.” The enduring relevance of these testimonials is that they can do both: provide answers and provoke questions.

Read the stories of local Michigan Holocaust survivors—Martin Adler, Henry Baum, Fryda Fleisch, Ben Guyer, Sophie Klisman, Gerald Manko, Paula Marks-Bolton, George Vine, and Marianne Wildstrom—through the lens of Wayne State University students.