As an educator at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Tim Kaiser spends a lot of time thinking about the Nazis’ systematic effort to exterminate European Jewry. As a Catholic, he spends a lot of time wondering how he would have reacted to the German genocide had he lived through World War II.
“I’m attracted to the study of the Holocaust through the bystander and through the perpetrator,” Kaiser, 39, said Friday night at a dinner in Warsaw sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League. “The question I ask myself is, ‘Could that have been me?’ I wonder, ‘Am I the bystander?’ “
“I keep wrestling with this on a basic, fundamental level,” he said.
In Poland for the May 5 March of the Living, along with a delegation of 75 American Catholic educators who completed the Bearing Witness Holocaust-education program, Kaiser’s concerns were not unique.
The Bearing Witness program, a five-day professional development workshop, was developed by the ADL in partnership with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Archdiocese of Washington.
“The history of Christianity is the history of anti-Semitism,” said Pete Fredlake, 51, who taught high-school students about the Holocaust for 30 years before taking a job recently at the Washington museum. “They kind of happened at the same time.
“I talk to a lot of people who won’t admit it,” continued Fredlake, who wore a “zachor” pin on his lapel. Zachor is Hebrew for “remember.”
“They say, ‘Well, that all happened in the past and I had nothing to do with it.’ I don’t think that’s healthy. I think it’s good to face history,” he said.
In addition to the ADL contingent, another 45 Catholic teachers took part in the annual march, where on Holocaust Remembrance Day participants walk from the concentration camp at Auschwitz to the nearby death camp at Birkenau, which together comprised the Nazis’ largest killing center.
In years past, the march mostly was limited to Jewish teenagers, who went to Poland and then on to Israel for the Jewish state’s memorial and independence days. This year, in recognition of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camps, the march was opened to many additional groups, including non-Jews, college students, Austrian police officers and young professionals.
At Friday night’s dinner, the ADL honored two non-Jews, a German and a Pole. Jerzy Kozminski was recognized for risking his life in order to save a Jewish family from the Warsaw Ghetto. Some of that family’s descendants attended the dinner.
“The biggest award for me is that the four generations of the people I had the chance to help save are alive,” Kozminski said in Polish through a translator.
Gert Weisskirchen, a member of Germany’s Parliament and an outspoken opponent of anti-Semitism, also was honored.
“The Shoah represented a monstrous rip in civilization and in time, and the Jews were supposed to disappear in it forever,” he said. “The present generation must be the safeguard of this knowledge time and again.”
Some 18,000 people from about 60 nations took part in the march, making it not only the biggest March of the Living yet but also the largest-ever Holocaust memorial ceremony, organizers said.
While in future years the number of participants most likely will drop back to previous levels — about 7,000 people — the level of diversity will remain, march officials said.
“If the Catholic educators come here and see firsthand, through the eyes of survivors and through educators, it takes the education they experienced prior to coming here and it raises them to a much higher level in being able to serve their communities in combating intolerance and hatred and developing respect for all humankind,” said David Machlis, vice chairman of the march.
As assistant superintendent of the diocese of Paterson, N.J., for five years, Sister Joseph Spring was in charge of overseeing curricula for 56 area Catholic schools. An important part of the schools’ programs revolved around Holocaust education, she said.
“I think it was the most cataclysmic tragedy of the 20th century,” said Spring, 59, who was making her third visit to the camps. “I don’t look at this as a Jewish issue. It’s just as much a Christian responsibility.
“We have a responsibility to atone,” she added.
Bryant Begany, 32, teaches sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders at the St. Pius X School in Whittier, Calif. For him, seeing the camps firsthand is partly about memorializing the victims of the Holocaust.
In addition, he said, visiting the sites would better prepare him to “extract students’ innate sentiment of tolerance.”
“Intolerance is something that is taught,” he said.
The march goes much farther than commemoration, Begany said.
He will be able to use lessons gleaned from the trip to teach students about morality and responsiblity.
The majority of Dottie Bessares’ students at the Precious Blood School in Los Angeles are Filipino and Hispanic. Most, she said, don’t know any Jews.
“I’m bearing witness for them,” she said. “There’s hope for tomorrow when we remember the past.”
Indeed, Fredlake said, he has never found a topic more effective in teaching young students core human values.
“I’ve always found that it’s very teachable,” he said. “And it’s a way to help kids see that things like democracy don’t just happen.”
Therese Collins, a non-Jewish Jewish studies major at New York’s City College — one of several non-Jews in that department who took part in the march — said that she saw a universal lesson in the Jewish Holocaust experience.
“The Holocaust starts from the notion that one” group of “people are not as good as the rest of the world,” said Collins, originally from Antigua.
“There are always stereotypes about Jews, and when you hear about what they went through, their persecution as a minority group, you realize stereotypes don’t describe a person. ‘Never again’ not just to persecution of Jews, but persecution of all innocent people.”
(Chanan Tigay traveled to Poland as a guest of the Anti-Defamation League. Carolyn Slutsky in Poland contributed to this report.)
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