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Against the tide

Marion Blumenthal Lazan speaks on childhood spent in Nazi concentration camp.

Posted by: Rhonda Robinson

Thursday, October 25, 2007 2:34 PM

"You are the last generation to hear the stories of the Holocaust first hand. You must tell them to your children, and then someday to your grandchildren." Her soft spoken words pierced a silent school auditorium.

Marion Blumenthal Lazan recalled her childhood years as a refugee, transit and prisoner in World War II to packed school auditoriums around area schools this week.

Hearing her speak had special meaning for me. Although I was born long after the war was over, traces of that war have been woven into the fabric of my life.

Growing up, a family lived next door that had fled Germany under Nazi rule. The mother wrote a book about her escape. Although I was too young to read it at the time, the cover -the black silhouette of a woman with a child in her arms and another by the hand running along a coiled fence of barbed wire-is forever etched in my memory. What I would give to read it now.

In the late seventies my husband and I lived in Berlin Germany. The wall was still up. White crosses lined our side of the wall- in memory of those who died trying to escape to freedom. People were still trying to escape when we lived there. One succeeded by hot air balloon, there was a movie made of it.

Guards armed with high power rifles stood in towers along the wall. American soldiers joked that if war broke out all the Russians had to do was turn around and point their riffles at us- and hang POW signs over the wall.

I lived in Berlin for six months before I got the joke---the wall was around us, not them.

Even in the seventies the war, and holocaust was still an open wound. Elderly women, who had lost their husbands in the war were everywhere-they didn't like us much. You would see them out shopping, wearing matching fur coats and hats in the winter, and carrying an umbrella and a bouquet of flowers in the summer.

I heard stories of the war from Berliners first hand; the few that would talk about it spoke mostly of the hardship of the wall. Nothing was ever said about the treatment of the Jewish people. That's understandable.

The documentary by Ken Burns "The War" that has been airing on WILL, has been criticized by the New York Times, "World War II didn't happen just to us. But it would be hard to glean that from Ken Burns's 7-night, 15-hour tribute to the greatest generation that ever bought war bonds, joined the Marines or tightened rivets on a B-17 Flying Fortress. "

"The war was necessary, but is this approach?"

I think so. The story is told from the perspective of small town America by the people who lived it against the back drop of real, sometimes horrifying footage.

When you hear people tell their stories, while looking into their eyes, each with their own perspective, you can separate the truth from propaganda.

Like when, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said "The West has given more significance to the myth of the genocide of the Jews..."

Marion spoke today at St. Matthews Catholic School in Champaign, and will be in Charleston tonight. (Click here for her schedule.)