The Republican, MA
May 28 2006
Survivor reaches teens with words
Sunday, May 28, 2006
By BETSY CALVERT
[email protected]
MONTAGUE – An American soldier handed his rifle to an emaciated
Jewish teenager in tattered striped pajamas in 1945, as if to say the
teenager was entitled to take revenge on his captors – German prison
camp soldiers that the American had just taken prisoner.
That teenager was Joseph Korzenik, now 81, of West Hartford. Korzenik
told a rapt audience of high school students recently that he quickly
threw the gun back at the American soldier whom he encountered in the
woods of Germany. He did not understand, nor feel entitled to take
any revenge on that day – the day of his liberation from six years of
Nazi torture and subjugation. Korzenik told the students that he had
begun to believe the constant barrage of degradation he had heard,
that as a Jew, he was less than human.
“I did not comprehend I was free,” he said.
Korzenik came to America after the war. When he tried to tell people
what happened, they did not believe him. So he stopped talking. He
had no great desire to live anymore. He married an American woman,
however, who gave him direction. Thirty years ago, she told him to
start telling his story of the Holocaust. He has not stopped talking
since, even though his wife died in 2000.
Korzenik was invited to speak at Turners Falls High School by
students in one class who are studying modern day holocausts, from
Armenian to Sudanese. Korzenik is a distant cousin to a science
teacher at the school, Robert Perlman.
Since he began his crusade to tell the world what happened to Jews
during World War II, Korzenik has spoken all over the world. A spry,
animated man, he told the students he only believes he can reach
teenagers. Adults have too much on their minds, he said.
He told his story chronologically, starting in 1939 when he was 14
and one of three children in a farming family in a small town in
Poland. His family was religiously devout, which he said he remains
today despite the images he retains of inhumanity. Korzenik
experienced all of the hallmarks of the war and the Holocaust,
including the occupation of his country by the Germans and the
subjugation of the Jews, first within their own villages, and
eventually, in death camps. As a young healthy male, Korzenik was
kept alive by his captors for his labor, allowing him to witness all
stages of the war, including near starvation.
“What my eyes saw, no human should have to see,” he said.
He described in brief but vivid detail to the utterly silent teens,
the random murders of Jewish infants, of his fellow prisoners, of the
path of starvation and disease, and of the sadistic behavior of the
German soldiers who controlled his life until 1945. He found out
after the war that his entire family had been gassed to death. He
remains haunted today of the image of his devout father asking God,
why such a fate?
His message to the students was to save themselves pain and suffering
by living without hate.
“The next time any one of you decides to hate anybody, you should
look in a mirror and see the person who hates and suffers,” he said.
Many of the students who were not studying genocide said Korzenik’s
story shocked them and moved them.
“It’s not like anything I’ve heard before,” said Kaleigh Shaw, 17, of
Erving.
“It really touched me,” said Lauren Tela, 18. “I never really put it
into perspective, how serious the Holocaust was.”
James Deputy, 17, said he was expecting another boring lecture on
history.
“I had no idea about that march to the farm,” he said, of Korzenik’s
description of the Nazis’ final fleeing of the Allies, marching
prisoners ahead of them through the woods. “You don’t get that in any
history book.”