April 18, 2003/Nisan 16 5763, Vol. 55, No. 34
Lecture honors Holocaust survivorsFirst Yom Hashoah commemoration marks history
BARRY COHEN
|
 Professor Christopher Browning will deliver three lectures to commemorate and historically recount Holocaust memories. Photo courtesy of United States Holocaust Museum |
Just days after the start of World War II, invading German forces placed Rosen and his family in a ghetto. In subsequent weeks, they liquidated the ghetto, block by block, transporting the residents to various concentration camps, but mostly to Treblinka, recalls Rosen.
The community was quickly reduced to 10,000, and most of those who remained produced bullets for a private German firm, says Rosen. The fact that he had experience working in industrial trades helped him survive, he adds. He continued producing bullets until the end of the war.
Edward Chulew recalls when the Germans arrived in his hometown of Rymanow, Poland, also in the war's early days.
"We were taken out from our homes and put in the middle of the city, as if they were going to shoot us," says Chulew.
German soldiers even separated the men from the women and children, he says, "and then, for no apparent reason, they let us go back to our houses."
Valley residents Sam Rosen, his wife Esther and Edward Chulew are the honorees at the first Yom Hashoah Scholar-in-Residence Program, April 28-29, sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program at Arizona State University, in association with Temple Chai, Friends of Jewish Studies at ASU and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Holocaust historian Christopher Browning will be the guest lecturer. One of his three lectures will address Jewish slave labor in central Poland, based on more than 200 survivor testimonies, similar to Rosen's experience.
"In talking with survivors, they know their barracks, their factory foreman, and what happened to them here and there," says Browning, "but it's still a historian's job to kind of put that all together and to create a larger narrative that no individual can do."
The survivors he has interviewed have understood his responsibility as a historian.
"I have found them very supportive and also quite open to the prospect that I know lots of things that they don't know," says Browning, the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In addition to his unpublished study on Jewish slave labor in Starachowice, Poland, he has published books addressing policymaking in Nazi Germany about the Final Solution, as well as case studies of the perpetrators of these plans.
| 'We are a people of memory' |
Kugelmass urged the committee to utilize the resources of the Jewish Studies Program at ASU, says Sharon Briskman, committee member.
"The purpose (of the committee) is to provide education, programs and learning opportunities for Temple Chai and for ... the greater community," says Briskman.
Helping facilitate a speaker by working with ASU is part of this effort, she adds.
The Jewish Studies Program already has one successful annual scholar-in-residence program in place with the Eckstein Scholar in Residence, Kugelmass notes.
"It has been my goal to triple or quadruple the number of these programs," he says. "We want to cover different aspects of the Jewish experience."
Browning was chosen as the honorary lecturer because of the "significant contribution" he has made to the field of Holocaust studies, says Kugelmass.
Browning is the Ina Levine Scholar for 2002-2003 at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The same Levine family helped establish the Ina Levine Jewish Community Campus in Scottsdale.
"I didn't know at the time he was selected (to be the scholar in residence) of his connection with the Holocaust Museum," says Kugelmass.
Browning received his doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion.
He will deliver lectures at Temple Chai, the Tri-City Jewish Community Center and Arizona State University's Tempe Campus (see Details box).
Each lecture will commemorate and historically document Holocaust memories.
Holocaust survivor Rosen says he will always remember the aftermath of when the Germans discovered that an underground was being organized in the Czestochowa ghetto.
"As retribution, punishment to the Jews, the Gestapo decided to take out 10 percent of the population," he says.
Rosen's mother was part of the selected 10 percent.
"They decided that my mother was too old," says Rosen. "She was 47."
Rosen was freed from the ghetto and the industrialized slave labor on Jan. 17, 1945. However, he did not seek revenge on the Germans, even when he had the opportunity.
"I had a chance to shoot an SS captain," says Rosen. "I had the gun - an automatic rifle - in my hand. ... I concluded that revenge is no remedy. I cured myself from hate."
After the end of the war, Rosen met Esther, who grew up in Stolpce, near Minsk, in Poland. They have been married for 54 years.
For Edward Chulew, the division of Poland by Germany and Russia provided an opportunity. His family crossed over to the Russian side to escape the Germans, he says. However, they were sent to Siberia, as if they were prisoners.
The Russian government soon allowed them to move to towns in Siberia and make a living, he adds.
"At that time, we did not realize what they Germans were doing," he says.
Underwriting for the Yom Hashoah commemoration was provided in part by the Rosens' and Chulew's children, Elliot and Tammy Rosen, Victory and Corey Rosen; and Mark and Stacey Chulew.
"It's time for the community to honor (Holocaust survivors) for what they went through and for the what they mean to the modern Jewish experience," says Kugelmass.
Contact the writer at barry_cohen@jewishaz.com.
-
Details
- What: "Holocaust Perpetrators"
- When: 7:30-9 p.m., Monday, April 28
- Where: Temple Chai, 4645 E. Marilyn Road, Phoenix
- Call: 602-971-1234
- What: "Survivor Testimony and Holocaust History"
- When: 12:30-1:30 p.m., Monday, April 28
- Where: Turquoise Room (208F), Memorial Union, ASU Tempe Campus
- What: "Holocaust Denial in the Courtroom"
- When: 10:30 a.m.-12 p.m.
- Where: Tri-City Jewish Community Center, 1521 Indian Bend Road, Tempe
- Call: 480-897-0588
All lectures are free of charge. For additional information, call 480-727-6906.