Holocaust survivor remembers horrors of occupation
By Russ Morgan (Contact)
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Holocaust survivor Nesse Godin brought her tale of horror and survival to Emporia Monday night, speaking not only to remember the phantoms of the past but also to call for a change in how we treat each other.
Hosted by SOS, the speech highlighted the agency’s mission to raise awareness of issues of abuse and survival and helped to raise money for its New Beginning Fund to support victims’ services.
Godin shared her tale to a multi-generational audience, including high school students bused in from Topeka.
She was 13 at the time Germany invaded her home country of Lithuania. She was a prisoner of the Nazies until she was seventeen, being held in the Shauliai Ghetto, four labor camps , the Stutthof Concentration Camp and, finally, a death march during which fewer than 200 out of almost 1,000 women survived.
“I’m not a speaker, or a teacher, or a lecturer,” Godin said. “What I am is a survivor of the Holocaust. And I’m here with you wonderful people for one reason only — to share memories. I do so so you will know the truth, you will understand, but most of all not allow atrocities to humanity ever again.”
Godin said people have told her she was either very strong or very smart to have survived the atrocities she witnessed and the beatings at the hands of Nazi guards.
“I was not too smart, and not to strong,” she said. “I was a little girl.”
Growing up as a Lithuanian Jew, she said she did not experience much prejudice until the Germans came. When they invaded in 1941, they took over in three days, and everything changed overnight. One of the first horrors she experienced was when the soldiers rounded up a group of 1,000 men and boys, took them into the forest, shot them and buried them in a mass grave. She heard a group of farmers talking about how the dirt covering them moved for days and days — many of them were wounded, but buried alive.
“This is the night I know the Holocaust was happening to me in Shauliai, Lithuania,” she said.
Her message revolved around the indifference and the collusion of her neighbors, people who didn’t speak up when they witnessed the evil taking place around them.
“The most important thing is we cannot change what was,” she said. But we can change what it is. When I was a little girl and suffered, nobody spoke up.”
She then turned the topic to other evils that take place in the world every day.
“My dear friends, yelling ‘Never again’ is not enough,” she said. “We have to act when we see a wrong. Whether we see a holocaust, whether it is children abused, whether it’s sexual abuse, whether it’s prejudice against other people, we have to act. We have to speak up.”
The Jews in her town appealed to a group of priests to confront the Germans, but instead the priests bribed the soldiers to let them live. The Germans agreed, rounded the Jews up and confined them to a ghetto, four square blocks surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by Lithuanian police.
Another atrocity occurred when she was 15 and had a job that allowed her to leave the ghetto during the day. One day a line of trucks appeared at the ghetto, and when she went back to the ghetto after work she heard wailing coming from the people inside. Many occupants of the ghetto had been rounded up, sent to Auschwitz and gassed. Godin’s father had been among the victims, along with many children, giving the event the name the Children’s Selection.
She addressed the audience, many of them high school students, and implored them to make a difference in the world and to help stop the wrongs that take place.
“Yes, we can make a difference,” she said. “... You stop this evil that’s happening everywhere to human beings. It doesn’t make a difference how they look or where they are, children are orphaned, homeless, hungry. Let’s be there for them.”
When she was sent to the concentration camp she managed to sneak into a labor camp, where women were working to dig holes as defenses against tanks. Not long after, the Russian army approached, forcing a German retreat. The women were rounded up and forced on a death march that lasted months. After suffering from hunger, cold and beatings, after seeing so much death and destruction, Godin said there were times she prayed for death.
“The women that gave me a bight of bread to eat, wrapped my body in straw to keep warm, pick me up from the ground when I was beaten up and wanted to die, they made me promise that I will tell the world what happened there,” she said. “That I would remember them, and teach the world what hatred, indifference and prejudice can do.”
Godin has spent a good part of her life sharing her story. She also volunteers at the United States Holocaust Museum.
Her message, she said, is that people can work to change how we treat each other, and that by remembering the evils of the past we can work to keep them from recurring.
“What I want people to take away is — be there for humanity,” she said. “Regardless how people look, regardless how they pray, regardless where they came from, we were all created by the Lord in heaven, whatever name we call him. and that is the message that we have to understand.”
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Posted by goodoleboy (anonymous) on November 24, 2009 at 6:35 p.m. (Suggest removal)
I wonder how this individual feels when protesters are parading around with signs of Obama( and those before him) comparing them to Hitler and instigating that America is comparable to Nazi Germany....
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