Betty Bausch speaks to students about her experience in WWII
The following quote is from a recent news article which you can read in full at http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4797397,00.html
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Just before Holocaust Memorial Day, 97-year-old survivor Betty Bausch has again packed her suitcase and travelled to tell young Germans of the harm that their nation inflicted decades before they were born. In recent years, this has become her life’s work.
Every time that Bausch finishes describing her family’s travails in the Holocaust and asks for audience questions, the room is filled with a tense silence that eventually becomes an honest, if painful, conversation between a survivor of the inferno and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the those who committed the atrocities.
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The moral of this story is this: never try to kick a Jew out of your country. The Jews have a right to live in any country in the world, even though they now have their own country [Israel].
The following quote is also from the news article, cited above:
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Bausch’s story of survival from the days of the war is extraordinary. Thanks to endless resourcefulness, aid in procuring forged documents, and an Aryan appearance, she managed to hide and live under a fake identity, thus avoiding being sent to a concentration camp.
She was born and raised in Amsterdam, where she had a happy childhood. Like most of the Netherlands’s Jews, she did not experience anti-Semitism.
Her parents passed on their religious and Zionist stances to their children. However, they hesitated and didn’t use the permits to immigrate to the Land of Israel that they had before the war. When the Germans invaded the Netherlands, it was too late, and they [her parents] were sent to the Sobibor extermination camp and killed.
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You can read about Sobibor on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Poland/Sobibor/Tour01.html
This quote is also from the news article:
Bausch has been speaking for 20 years in the Netherlands and for the past six in Germany. “I always begin by telling the youths about my time at their age, when I was 16 years old,” she said, “because I think that it interests them, what I did at their age, and not at 97.
At that time, we only had one radio, which I would always turn on when Hitler was making a speech. He would say, ‘The Jews are the rats of the world and must be destroyed.’ When my family heard that, they would say to me, ‘Betty, turn it off, turn it off; we don’t want to hear it.’ I was the only one told them, ‘We have to hear it; we have to know what that man wants to do with the Jews. If he says it, he’ll do it.’ They would answer me, ‘No, no, it’s just words.’
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Did you catch that? These Jews in the Netherlands had ONLY ONE RADIO. When I was a child, my family did not have even one radio. We had to go a neighbor’s house to hear President Roosevelt speak on the radio. I should be out on the lecture circuit, telling about how I suffered during World War II. Oh, the humanity!
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