The News-Sentinel
Distributed by Knight/Ridder Tribune News Service
April 17, 2006 Monday
Holocaust survivor wants to stop other genocides
by Erika Nordblom, The News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne, Ind.
Apr. 17–Philip Bialowitz was just 16 when he narrowly escaped death
at the hands of the Nazis. Unlike his father, mother and millions of
other Polish citizens, he survived to tell the story of the Nazis and
their campaign of ethnic cleansing.
An estimated 250,000 Jews were murdered at Sobibor, a prison camp in
Poland.
In 1943, Bialowitz was part of a successful uprising in which six
hundred prisoners fled. Many were killed during the escape, while
others made it to the forest surrounding the camp. Bialowitz was one
of only 48 who survived to see the end of the war that following
year.
He will be in Fort Wayne through April 20 and is scheduled to appear
at 7 tonight at Congregation Achduth Vesholom, 5200 Old Mill Rd. His
speech is part of the annual Yom Hashoah (Holocaust remembrance)
observance of the Fort Wayne Jewish Federation.
The service is free and open to the public. Bialowitz will also speak
at area schools, including Indiana University-Purdue University Fort
Wayne.
By telling his story, Bialowitz hopes to bring attention to the fact
that the Holocaust was not an isolated incident.
“The systematic murder of innocent human beings continues, even in
the 21st century,” he says, “My survival means very little if
Hitler’s legacy of genocide lives on.”
Bialowitz points to the mass killings in the Darfur region of western
Sudan as a recent example of genocide.
“Four-hundred thousand human beings have been murdered only because
of their race,” he says of the conflict in Africa.
When Bialowitz remembers the people who suffered at Sobibor, he
thinks of groups like the people in Darfur, who continue to suffer
today.
“Sobibor stands forever as a warning of what happens when we allow
barbarism to grow out of control,” he says.
Bialowitz says his story is a warning to future generations about the
danger of letting evil prevail.
“We cannot allow our world’s leaders to continue to abandon our
fellow human beings in the same way that they abandoned the
Armenians, the Jews, the Chinese, the Cambodians, the Rwandans, the
Bosnians, and now the Darfurians,” he says, “Sobibor must stand,
today and throughout the ages, as a reminder of the power we all have
within us to save our lives and the lives of our fellow human
beings.”
HEAR HIM: Philip Bialowitz will speak at noon tomorrow in Kettler
Hall (Room G32) on the IPFW campus, 2101 E. Coliseum Blvd. This event
is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the
IPFW Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs at 481-6608.