Holocaust Survivor Brings Message Of Perseverance To Middle Schoolers

1148

By Madelynne Kislovsky
RED BANK – Hanna Wechsler would not be speaking of her perilous journey if it were not for her extreme tenacity and desire to survive. Wechsler spoke to about 85 eighth grade students at Red Bank Middle School on Wednesday about her experiences as a child Holocaust survivor, in order to show them the importance of perseverance and kindness.
“Stand up always for your own rights, with grace and gentleness. Whatever life brings along, never let any obstacle stand in your way,” Wechsler said.
The 80-year-old survivor spoke easily with the youngsters, joking and smiling during her story, sometimes struggling to find a word she was looking for, with her audience shouting out options. Wechsler’s message to the students was to never let anyone put them down. Although no one in the room had a story similar to Wechsler’s, her message fits into countless situations of struggle.
“When there’s a will there’s a way, but you have to work for it. It doesn’t grow on trees,” she said.
Red Bank Middle School eighth grade English teacher Holly Kluck organized the assembly. Her goal as a teacher is to include an underlying theme of fighting hate with humanity in all of the topics she covers in class. After her class read ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” a novel set in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, she wanted to make the most of the experience and show how systemic intolerance can manifest itself in society.
“This is the role of education, to move children, and teach them how to think. They’re the generation that can change things,” Kluck said.
After planning a trip to the Jewish Memorial Museum in Battery Park, New York later this month, the Museum got Kluck in contact with Wechsler. “I can talk to the kids about kindness for hours, but hearing a story from a woman like this taught them more than I ever could,” Kluck said.
Wechsler was five years old when Hitler’s forces reached Poland. Her mother, determined and fearless, did the utmost she could to protect her daughter, the future of their family. After being forced out of a basement that was home to 11 people, Wechsler and her family wandered “No Man’s Land,” as Wechsler called it, and were eventually rounded up and taken to the Krakow ghetto, a frightening and filthy temporary home, surrounded by tombstones.
“A child who is exposed to a horrible situation is no longer a child, but a grown-up. I was a little grown-up,” Wechsler said. “This is a feeling I don’t wish on my worst enemy. To only focus on living, when you are dying little by little every day, is very difficult.”
Wechsler’s mother gave her the same advice each morning. “If they hit you, you pretend you are not hurt. If they offend you, you laugh,” Wechsler spoke the words her mother said to her. “I realized she was teaching me something important,” the survivor said. “To live and continue existing like a human, you had to do what you had to do. It’s also a method of God’s will and destiny,” she said.
Soon after, the family was interrogated, Wechsler’s parents tortured, and all put on a train to Auschwitz. The “crème de la crème” of the German army, the SS, crammed the family and more than 600 others into a cattle car. Only 300 came off upon the cars arrival. Wechsler and her mother were separated from her father when they got to Auschwitz. “Children in Auschwitz were a rarity, as they used to be killed right away,” Wechsler explained as she held up a magnified version of the tattoo that was brutally stabbed into her arm upon her arrival. #88987. This was her name, her identity. “Who am I today? A member of a dying generation. All the rest, my family, my parents, are dead. I am a representative,” she said.
At night, Wechsler’s mother would sneak out of Barrack #18, hiding her daughter in her assigned bunk that lacked a mattress or covers, to steal an extra piece of bread or a small potato to keep her daughter alive. Each time, Weschler would beg her mother to stay. “Either I die, or you die,” she would say. At age nine, Weschler and her mother escaped Auschwitz after the Germans abandoned the camp towards the end of the war, forcing the strongest imprisoned Jews to travel with them. After hiding for days, they were eventually reunited with her father, who was liberated from Dachau and went from building to building describing his wife and daughter, searching for them. The family immigrated to Israel and continued their lives. Wechsler’s mother, Ruja, died peacefully at home at age 94.
Red Bank students asked Wechsler if it was hard to tell her story.
“It’s not terrible for me. I am a miracle,” Wechsler said. “By the end of the Holocaust, Hitler had eliminated 6 million Jews, 1.5 million of them being children. In my life, I never met a whole family who survived Auschwitz. I am a firm believer of God. People get angry with me when I say that, asking where God was when this happened. To survive with a mother and father is an act of God.”
Wechsler met her husband and immigrated to the United States in 1968. She held a job at a Playtex bra factory until she moved to the suburbs with her husband, and attended a Jewish Academy for Hebrew teachers to become a teacher, and taught for 45 years. She later attended Kovats Real Estate School in Paramus and worked in real estate for 21 years.
Wechsler has been speaking about her experiences at colleges, Catholic schools, museums, synagogues, and convents for almost 17 years. Her message to all of her audiences is this, “Never succumb to failure, whether you are dealing with mental abuse, bullying, or any other difficult situation. If you don’t fight for yourself, no one will,” she said.