Page 40 - Harnett Life Winter 2020

too sick to travel, they couldn’t leave the camp for another that. You must not forget that we are one story. We survived,
three months. When they did, they returned to Hungary, where but there are other people.”
Judy’s parents were married and Judy was born. Fearing a new
wave of antisemitism when Russia invaded their homeland in The Holocaust presentation was arranged through the Cen-
1956, Judy’s family escaped, fleeing first to Austria, then to ter for Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education of
England and eventually Canada, where they settled in Mon- North Carolina, a speakers bureau based in Chapel Hill. It was
treal as refugees. offered as part of CCCC ACES, the college’s Academic and
Cultural Enrichment Series, with assistance from the CCCC
Klara Mermelstein, her sister and one brother survived the Ho- Foundation’s Joyner Fund.
locaust. Her mother, father and three brothers did not. “The
reason my mother got through the Holocaust was because she As guests moved in and out of the auditorium, many stopped
had a goal,” Judy told the audience. “And her goal was not her- in front of more than a dozen easels, taking in heartbreaking
self; it was to save her younger sister, who was 14 years old.” photographs of the Holocaust. Images of victims and sites like
the Auschwitz concentration camp were framed in historical
There were very few empty seats in a civic center auditori- periods, beginning with Jewish life between the two World
um packed with college students, elected officials and even a Wars and moving from Adolph Hitler’s rise to power though
group of fourth- and fifth-graders from Tramway Elementary. life after liberation from Nazi rule.
Still, except for some conversation during a 15-minute ques-
tion and answer session that covered topics ranging from im- The exhibit, titled “Shoah: How Was It Humanly Possible?,”
migration to how people should teach the Holocaust, there was was provided by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remem-
not a sound as Judy and Mike recounted the history of Klara brance Center in Israel, and considered that question: How
Mermelstein and her family. could something as immoral as the Holocaust — or “Shoah,”
using the Hebrew word — have happened at all? The final
“It’s not over,” Judy concluded, encouraging everyone to re- easel presented a quote from Primo Levi, a noted writer and
flect on the recent resurgence of antisemitism and other preju- Holocaust survivor. It came as an ominous warning, one that
dice in America. “There are people who are still treated like still resonates, even an ocean and many decades away: “It hap-
pened, therefore it can happen again.”

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FUTURE!

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