Last Friday (May 13) we were told of the opportunity to listen to a "Holocaust Survivor" in the school board room.
I was excited, and almost all of the students were excited. Somebody who lived through a horrible moment in history would be in the board room for all of us to listen to.
What a disappointment!
The woman did not live through the holocaust, but rather was a person born during the German invasion of the Ukraine in 1941 while her mother was fleeing to Siberia.
Before continuing, let's define the term "Holocaust Survivor." I say this defines a person who was captured by the Germans, put into a concentration camp, and lived long enough to be freed by American, British, or Russian soldiers. Wikipedia has a definition I can agree with.
So, who did we listen to? What do we call her? I suggest we heard somebody who could tell a good story, or spin a tale with much gusto.
During her talk she did reveal that while she did not have a memory of her childhood, she was able to tell us how her mother escaped in a overcrowded cattle car from Kiev, her home town in the Ukraine, to some place in Siberia where her mother became a worker at a factory that recycled damaged war vehicles into bullets.
Later she told us of the first time she met her father, in 1946, who offered her an apple. She told us she thought it was a potato! All of this included speaking in what I presume was her native language, Ukrainian.
So, on and on she went. Then she told us she interviewed holocaust survivors in 1961 in Israel, when she said she went to cover a war crimes trial there.
Finally her time was over. The way she reacted towards the end of her presentation led some students to think of her as "mean." I agree with them.
So, unlike what we were told, we actually heard a story teller discuss historical occurrences she did not experience.