Surviving the Holocaust: Lessons for Humankind
“The only thing that can never be taken away from you…is what you learn” — Sarah Saaroni
Just 12 hours ago we sat down with Jewish Holocaust survivor, Sarah Saaroni (OAM), 92, and now you are reading the preface of the many lessons revealed about humanity dawned from this account.
Here’s where the morning started:
The year was 1939. War in Poland, finally declared.
Sarah, a 13-year-old school girl, had just been denied entrance to high school despite passing all the requirements — the first of many penalties of being born Jewish in anti-semitist Poland.
When even the Church and State can agree to encourage the Polish to detest the Jews, there is no hope for them to escape being targets for every disaster and problem in the country.
By 1942, the political landscape was: persecution for all Jews.
Ostracised for her Jewish membership, Sarah was forced to flee Poland alone, leaving her family behind to seek refuge under the fake identity of a young Christian girl labouring in Germany. But life was no better, she was on-the-run with no one to trust and nowhere to hide. The young girl was scared and oppressed but forced to grow up for the sake of survival.
What struck me most at this point of the morning, was that Sarah made justifications for why she was mistreated by people she would call her compatriots. For an entire segment of society, they just had to accept facing pogrom as reality…their entire life.
By age 16, Sarah had been betrayed by her neighbours, ousted as a Jew, held prisoner by the Gestapo and sent to the concentration camp in Lublin, Poland. As Sarah recounted the tumultuous escape from the train-ride to her destined extermination, I could not help but feel her dying thirst in my own mouth, her ravenous hunger in my own stomach and her fearful, shivering child’s body struggling through open fields of snow.
Desperation… in a pursuit to live.
This agile and lively woman, sitting before us, had endured every trial and tribulation to see the sun rise another day. She had everything taken away from her; her family…a home…her own identity and any hope of ever belonging.
Let me repeat that again so it really sinks in. She had everything taken away from her; her family…a home…her own identity and any hope of ever belonging.
Yet, when we asked her how did you find the courage to go on after the war… after everything there was to overcome to build your life from scratch again?
She solemnly answered, “Because the only thing that can never be taken away from you…is what you learn.”
Sarah arrived in Australia in 1953, with her husband and two children, but without speaking a single word of English or a single penny to their name… learning to survive because “life goes on regardless”.
By this point, we could all recognise the years of the Holocaust as not just a war, but a real part of our human history. Despite experiencing true “evil”, Sarah still heroes the message, “the world is so beautiful…if only people could live in peace and accept one another.”
Let’s learn from our human history…to be humankind, that means being human… AND kind.
Love Always,
Li
