“What’s ‘the Holocaust’?” my 11-year-old son asks me. I take a deep breath as I gauge how much to tell him. He’s old enough to understand that prejudice can lead to hatred, but I can’t help but feel he’s too young to hear about the full spectrum of human horror that hatred can lead to.
I wrestle with that thought, considering the conversation I recently had with Ben Lesser, a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor who was just a little younger than my son when he witnessed his first Nazi atrocity.
It was September of 1939 and the Blitzkrieg occupation of Poland had just begun. Ben, his parents, and his siblings were awakened in their Krakow apartment by Nazi soldiers who pistol-whipped them out of bed and ransacked their home. As the men with the shiny black boots filled burlap sacks with the Jewish family’s valuables, a scream came from the apartment across the hall. Ben and his sister ran toward the cry.
They found a Nazi swinging their neighbors’ baby upside down by its legs, demanding that the baby’s mother make it stop crying. As the parents screamed, “My baby! My baby!” the Nazi smirked—then swung the baby’s head full force into the door frame, killing it instantly.
This story and others like it feel too terrible to tell my young son, too out of context from his life of relative safety and security. And yet Ben Lesser lived it at my son’s age. And it was too terrible—for anyone, much less a 10-year-old. And it was also completely out of context from the life of relative safety and security Ben and his family had known before the Nazi tanks rolled in.
Before I spoke with Ben, I had prepared myself for what I was going to hear. The baby story was brutal, but I’d read enough Holocaust stories to expect all manner of horror. The Jews being rounded up and taken to the woods to dig their own graves before being shot and thrown into them. The cattle cars crammed with bodies so tightly no one could move—where men, women, and children languished in hunger and thirst, standing in their own excrement for days. The Nazi commandant who made every 10th prisoner in line hold their body over a sawhorse and take 25 lashes, shooting in the head anyone whose body touched the sawhorse through the beating.
The concentration camps, the death camps, the gas chambers. I was prepared for all of that.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the fact that Ben Lesser’s dad was a chocolate maker. He was one of the first, Ben explained to me proudly, to make chocolate-covered wafer cookies, like a Kit-Kat, only he made his in the shape of animals.
Hearing Ben describe the way he and his siblings would excitedly run to their father when he got home from work, knowing he’d have pockets full of chocolate for them—that was the detail that did me in. The simple sweetness of it. The fact that their life was so delightfully normal before it turned into a nightmare. That backdrop made hearing about the horrors Ben witnessed and experienced from age 10 to 16 all the more heinous.
Ben was 15 when he and two of his siblings were shoved into a cattle car and transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp complex where Nazis systematically murdered 1.1 million people in five years. When they exited the car, a man was directing people to go left or right. Ben, a strong young man, was sent to the right with his uncle and cousin—they were going to work. His sister Goldie and younger brother Tuli were sent to the left.
Ben only learned that his sister and brother had gone straight to the gas chambers when a guard later explained, with a twisted sense of satisfaction, that the ash gently falling from the sky was made up of the bodies of the workers’ loved ones.
By the time the war ended, Ben would lose his parents, three of his four siblings, and countless extended family members and friends to Hitler and his followers’ hatred. His older sister, Lola, was the only member of his immediate family to survive.
The stories Ben shared from Auschwitz-Birkenau, from the “Death March” to Buchenwald, and from Dachau—where he would ultimately be liberated when the war ended—are every bit as horrific as everything I’ve described so far. It would take far more space than I have here to share it all, but Ben has written it all down—the tragedy and suffering as well as the miracles that occurred both during and after the war—in his autobiography.
But simply putting it all down in writing wasn’t enough.
“In my mind there are questions that have never been answered,” Ben writes in the opening of his memoir. “You might be surprised to learn that my first unanswered question is not, Why did that insane Hitler try to destroy the Jewish People? Instead, my first unanswered question is, Why did the so-called sane world stand by and let this Genocide happen?
“Having experienced the savagery of genocide first-hand as a child, while living in a supposedly modern, cultured, European country, I also have two additional questions: One, What are the circumstances and choices that led up to this and other genocides? And two: What must we do to prevent it from happening again? Anywhere. Because, sadly, as the old saying tells us, ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.’”
These are the questions Ben seeks to help all of us answer as time takes us further and further away from the Holocaust. Ben is one of a handful of survivors who are able to share first-hand experiences as Jews under Nazi terror—a fact he was keenly aware of when he founded the ZACHOR Holocaust Remembrance Foundation in 2009. “ZACHOR” means “REMEMBER,” and the purpose of the foundation is to make sure the world never forgets the lessons of the Holocaust or the millions of individual lives that were taken there.
The story of the Holocaust isn’t just in the masses of humanity killed, but in the individual stories of those who survived. For years, Ben spoke at schools, sharing his story with young people. At 91, Ben has retired from the school circuit, but he’s not slowing down in his efforts to teach the lesson of what hate can lead to.
ZACHOR has just launched an online Holocaust curriculum—the first to be created and facilitated by and through the firsthand testimonial of a survivor. Ben told Upworthy that he wanted to create a curriculum that would be free and easy for teachers to access so there would be no excuse for schools not to teach about the Holocaust.
Considering the study findings that came out today, Ben’s curriculum could not be more timely.
The 50-state survey of young adults in the U.S. found that nearly two-thirds were unaware that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, nearly 1 in 4 say they think the Holocaust is a myth or that it’s exaggerated, and approximately 1 in 10 had either had never heard of it, didn’t think it happened at all, or—perhaps most alarmingly—think Jews were responsible for it.
Clearly, we need to be doing a better job of educating our kids about the Holocaust. If we don’t, the online disinformation machine will lead them to believe it was all a hoax.
The Zachor Holocaust Curriculum consists of eight lessons, which interweave Ben’s personal story with facts about the Eastern European part of the war, how Hitler and the Nazis operated, and the Holocaust in general. It includes written content, fact inserts, photographs, and videos. It is free to register to use, and available to anyone with internet.
Perhaps the most unique element of the ZACHOR curriculum is the interactive component. Ben has created a Storyfile—a mix of artificial intelligence and hologram technology that will enable people to ask Ben questions and get answers long after he’s no longer here. He spent hours answering thousands of questions, all of which was recorded from various angles and put into the Storyfile program, so people will always be able to hear Ben’s answers to their questions from his own mouth.
Ben’s foundation has also launched an anti-bullying campaign called “I SHOUT OUT.” Anyone can go to the website i-shout-out.org and share what they shout out for—equality, peace, human rights, etc.—to let the world they stand against hatred.
I asked Ben what is the main message he wants people to take from the horrors of the Holocaust. He said, “It’s very simple. Stop the hatred.”
We all need to listen and heed Ben’s words. Even just this five-minute video in which he shares how the Holocaust got started is worth viewing and sharing with our kids.
It may be a few more years before I share the full scope of Nazi cruelty with my son. But I will absolutely make sure that he knows what happened during WWII, about the millions of lives destroyed by hatred, and how, as Ben says, “One person with the gift of gab could turn the minds of millions.”
Zachor indeed. We will remember.
