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2005 MediaNews Group, Inc. Old, new stories of ethnic cleansing shared at HCCBYLINE: LINDA CONNER LAMBECK BRIDGEPORT -- Anita Shorr's graphic tale of hunger, horror and eventual liberation from a German concentration camp in 1945 is what many have come to expect from a Holocaust remembrance program like the one Housatonic Community College hosted on Thursday. Susan Ratanavong's escape from Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand via the Mekong River some three decades later was less predictable. The soft-spoken academic adviser at Housatonic was 6 years old in 1975 when the Communists took over Laos and ethnic cleansing began. She choked backed tears as she described her mother's risky plan to split up her children and send them two-by-two -- posing as children of Thai merchants -- past armed guards to freedom. It was the family's second escape attempt. The first landed them in prison with the threat of execution if they tried again. "My mother was a very brave woman," said Ratanavong, who spent five years in a Thai refugee camp before she was reunited with her father, who escaped from a mountain concentration camp. He was so emaciated, she said, he could only convince his family it was really him by recalling the song he used to sing to his son when he was a baby. Both Shorr, of Westport, and Ratanavong, of Bridgeport, helped hammer home the notion that horrific genocides are not just a thing of the past. "We think history is what happened way back when. Know that the thing you're doing today will be tomorrow's history," said Gail Ostrow, an adjunct professor at Housatonic who organized the afternoon program. In addition to listening to Holocaust survivors and the work of Holocaust poet Stephen Herz of Westport, students, staff and visitors viewed a Holocaust art display and signed petitions calling on action in the crisis in Sudan, where 200,000 people have been killed. They are asking President Bush to step in to stop the violence in Sudan's Darfur region. Some cut out and pinned yellow, six-pointed paper stars to their shirts. One student, Michael Santiago, 21, of Bridgeport, asked Holocaust survivor Zelig Preis, 81, of Trumbull, to explain why Jews were a target. Preis told him Jews were a scapegoat for hard economic times, but were far from Hitler's only target. An estimated 11 million people were murdered during the Holocaust, six million of them Jewish. Preis, who came from Poland, was 15 years old when the Germans invaded in 1939. He remembers Polish people telling the Nazis the whereabouts of Jewish families in exchange for pounds of sugar. He spent time in six concentration camps, including Plaszow, the camp portrayed in the movie "Schindler's List." Preis' brother was shot and killed by Amon Goeth, the camp's sadistic commander. Preis said he tells his story so that others will teach their children to be tolerant. "Tolerance can't be assumed: It has to be taught," he said. Shorr, born in Czechoslovakia, told the audience she was almost 9 when she started losing her friends, then her freedom, family and dignity. She survived through a series of lucky breaks, yet can describe in excruciating detail the overwhelming feeling of hunger she felt the entire time. "The feeling of emptiness in your belly, there is nothing else you can do or think about. That is why hunger does not have a plural. You cannot measure it," she said. Shorr said it took as much courage to rebuild her life as it took to survive. By the time she was 18, she was an officer fighting in the Israeli war for independence. "I survived and I feel a responsibility. I carry the voice of six million Jews that were murdered. I give you now a mission: You must remember my story and make sure something like this never happens again." Anita Senes, 28, a former Housatonic student from Bridgeport, found the presentation powerful. "It really makes me realize the danger that exists in the world," she said. "I think about what a sheltered life I live and I mourn for the suffering these people went through. I'm not Jewish but it's not about being Jewish." Linda Conner Lambeck, who covers regional education issues, can be reached at 330-6218.
Anson C. Smith |
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