We had a very special 8th Grade Class today. We were privledged to have a guest speaker, Larry Hiss, a Holocaust survivor, who shared his personal exparience.
As readers of my blog know, I teach both 8th Grade Sunday school and Adult Education classes for the JCS (Jewish Cultural School) of Ann Arbor. I asked Larry Hiss to come to speak with the 8th Grade class and to share his experiences.
One of my goals was to ensure that the class understands that history is not just something that you read about in books, but events that people like themselves lived through, that history is a living document. Larry was gracious enough to come and to tell not only his story, but to explain how that awful time effected his life. The most impressive thing was that he never lost his humanity, despite all that happened to him.
Larry was born in 1928, in Poland. His father was an engineer at an oil refinery. On September 1st 1939, when Larry was 11, Nazi Germany invaded and conquered Poland. On September 17th, 1939, Soviet Russia invaded the eastern part of Poland and Larry lived in the area that the Russians had conquered. As he said, "that bought us two years." As bad as the Russians were, life for Jews was better than Jews fared in the German-occupied section. In 1941, Germany went to war with Russia and the Russian held section was annexed.
Larry and his family were forced to live in the ghetto. When he was 13, he was among a group of boys that were rounded up and taken to the police station. A German friend of the family had Larry and one other boy pulled out to do work. All the other boys were taken away by truck and executed by machine gun.
He would eventually be sent to a series of concentration camps, including the infamous Mauthausen-Gusen Camp. He would see his father and mother killed, being saved from death again by the intervention of the German friend.
Larry would survive until liberated by the allies. He spoke of how many of the liberating soldiers were "black" African-Americans. He spoke of how many people who survived the camps, couldn't survive the rations fed to then by the allies.
He lived in a camp for displaced persons, eventually transferred to a camp for Jewish concentration camp survivors. He heard that there was list of people who were seeking to go to America, placed his name on the lsit and eventually came to the US in 1947. Speaking no English and with no marketable job skills, he was sent to an orphanage in Ohio. He would be placed with an American family and would enlist in the US Army in 1948.
Eventually, he would find work as a home salesman, where he would find success. He worked alongside with two fellow survivors. He would marry and his life could well be termed an American success story. He would eventually move to Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Despite the horrors he experienced and those that he witnessed, Larry is a man without hate, without anger. He was wonderful speaking with the kids, taking care to be understood.
Our class this year is about social activism, about how individuals can change the world. We have visited a mosque, we will participate in volunteer projects. Larry Hiss has provided a shining example of how a man, despite all that happened to him and his generation, can retain his basic goodness and go on to help others.