Learning from history

Eighty years after the Holocaust, survivors and their descendants continue to share their stories, reminding us of the importance of learning from history.

On April 17, students from six area high schools gathered at the Grand Theater to hear testimonies from two women whose lives were shaped by zealous hatred.

Eva Zaret was eight years old when the Nazis invaded Hungary and changed life as she knew it forever.

Nancy Kennedy Barnett, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, grew up searching for the relatives she’d lost in the movies she watched with her family.

The speakers had traveled to Wausau with the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center (HERC), based in Milwaukee, for a presentation organized by Maria Prust, a teacher at D.C. Everest.

“The school I work at does ‘you matter’ days with our students, and our theme for spring is ‘live to give,’” said Prust. “I couldn’t think of a better way for our students to understand how these two women are living to give and giving back and sharing their family stories and their personal stories, so that started it.”

The idea grew to include multiple high schools. As an average high school auditorium wouldn’t be large enough to accommodate the number of students they were planning for, Prust suggested the Grand.

The presentation coincided with many of the students’ curriculums. Sophomores at D.C. Everest, for example, recently read Romanian Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s haunting memoir, Night.

The accounts of Barnett and Zaret — told alongside photos of their families before and after the Holocaust and footage of Barnett’s father, George Kennedy, describing his experience — were just as haunting.

“If the Nazis had been successful, I wouldn’t be here,” Barnett told the darkened room. Her father survived the Holocaust through a combination of keeping his wits about him and sheer luck, but most of his relatives lost their lives.

“Although the Holocaust happened over 80 years ago, the dehumanization at its center still exists today,” said Barnett. Her father had been fond of the saying ‘those who don’t remember the past will be doomed to repeat it’ and fought to spread awareness of what had been done to him and millions like him in order to prevent it from happening again.

“Cruel happenings, cruel people,” Kennedy says in one of Barnett’s recordings. “You cannot imagine any nationality would do it… but it can happen again.”

The key to preventing it, Barnett said, is to speak out against injustices “at the very beginning,” before they can snowball into events as widespread as the Holocaust.

Zaret expressed similar sentiments. 

“I am very against hatred and very much for people to love each other and to respect each other,” Zaret said. 

Zaret still has nightmares about the crimes she witnessed as a child, and every time she testifies about her experience, it puts her right back in those eight-year-old’s shoes. She speaks out anyway, she said, to fight for a more loving world.

“I say that I won, not Hitler, not the Nazis,” said Zaret, because she has a large, wonderful family, friends who love her and the power of knowledge.

“I say life and people [are] wonderful,” she said. “I love people. I want to bring you in with love. And when I see my whole family together, I say, ‘This is good.’ We all deserve good and no hatred.”

And if it means Zaret needs to fight to create that good, then she will. 

“If you see the wrong thing, get involved. No bullying,” Zaret said. She is adamantly anti-bullying. 

“To respect a person sometimes brings out the best in a person,” she continued. “You have to do… good things. To do good things is for the whole world.”

HERC Director of Education Sam Goldberg wrapped up the session with a Q&A with the speakers.

“We learn history because we want to see the warning signs [and prevent the Holocaust from happening again]” Goldberg said. “We want advocates.”

As for Prust, she hoped to see students walk away with the importance of one person’s act of kindness making a difference.

“I’ve heard Eva speak before, and that’s one of the things that she talks about, is that one person’s act of kindness can make a difference,” she said. “I think [students] need to be reminded of that, because sometimes they think they’re just, ‘I’m just a teenager and what I do doesn’t matter.’”

“If one person will do the right thing once, you save a life,” Zaret said.

For more information on HERC, visit https://holocaustcentermilwaukee.org

Editor's note: This article has been edited to list the correct link for the HERC's website.