Column: Holocaust Remembrance Day personal for columnist

04/21/09 - Whether it's through reading about it in a textbook, flipping through Anne Frank's diary or seeing "Schindler's List", the Holocaust is a subject that is familiar to many. But for me, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is today, has taken on a whole new meaning, all thanks to one man and an old clothes hanger.

My senior year of high school, I was part of a program, the Second Generation Holocaust Fund, which helped chronicle the experiences of Holocaust survivors. We kicked off the extensive, year-long project with a trip to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.

Our group visited the museum with some of the survivors, who had volunteered to spend the afternoon supplementing our museum tour with their own stories of survival. Together, we saw the evidence and history of hatred, sealed behind neatly-organized glass exhibits and labeled with typed placards.

I spent that afternoon with Bernie, a tall, elderly man, who spoke with a heavy accent and walked with a cane. His wife, a sweet, petite blonde and retired school-teacher, trailed behind us.

His reminiscence was engaging, whip-smart and witty. He had a strong sense of humor and a penchant for chatter. As we strolled through the exhibits, he shared with me a life story that was powerful to behold.

Bernie, a survivor of Auschwitz, lost the majority of his family during the Holocaust. He remained a working prisoner in the notorious death camp until the end of the war. The Nazis, sensing the Allied forces approaching, forced Bernie, his brother and the other 60,000 individuals enslaved in the barbed wire fences, on a death march toward other western camps. It was on this march that his brother died, killed by a Nazi officer for walking too slowly.

Bernie shared these stories with the power and passion of a practiced orator. The details were never too gritty, and he never shied away from speaking of his family's death. He adamantly wanted his message to be heard and he was more than willing to make it happen.

The only thing that gave him pause was one of the museum's most powerful exhibits.

A nearly bare room, dimly lit and quiet, showed a model of Auschwitz's gas chambers. Replicas detailed the entire gruesome mechanism, while white-washed clay figurines of people stood lined up outside the doors-representations of the individuals, like many in Bernie's family, who met their end there.

To enter this exhibit, visitors had to walk through one of the boxcars used to transport Jews to Auschwitz. It was there Bernie had to stop.

He stood outside the boxcar, suddenly trembling and holding his wife's hand. A man who had survived so much, seen so much death and destruction and triumphed in spite of it, stood scared of this old, wooden boxcar.

The last time Bernie approached the door of a similar car, he had been a young man being deported to a concentration camp with his family. He faced those same sliding doors more than 60 years later with an expression on his face so earnestly devastated that it seemed like no time had passed since.

I walked inside with him, and Bernie approached a cut out window on the side of the car. He looked around, getting his bearings, shifting left and right, before settling on a spot. This is where he had stood, he explained, all those years ago. He pointed to places on the worn wooden planks where his mother and family had been. The last time he saw many of them alive was in that boxcar.

Bernie passed away a few months later and my group and I went to sit Shiva with his wife and children. The traditional Jewish grieving ceremony was something most of us were unaccustomed to, and walking into his house was unnerving. The space he had occupied such a short while ago was crowded with relatives, photos and cards-testaments to the exuberant, funny, loving man Bernie had been.

But the thing that stood out the most was dangling from a clothing hanger in the living room. A worn shirt and pair of pants with long horizontal stripes, graying with age-Bernie's Auschwitz uniform.

It looked so out of place, in a room full of flat-screen televisions, home computers and Blackberry's concealed in visitor's pockets. A symbol of such terror and inhumanity did not belong in this modern age. In an era where technology can bring us together and keep us connected, where nothing is beyond the instant scope of our perception, something so heinous should not be able to exist.

And yet, it is because of the modern age that this uniform can exist. The Holocaust marked the modernization and mechanization of murder. People ceased to be people, and became numbers, stripped of humanity, branded, enslaved and murdered. Technology and science, now lauded as the miracle that can cure society's ills, helped to create the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Sitting in Bernie's living room, it was easy to say something as universally deplorable as the Holocaust could never happen again. It is simple to assume that collectively we would never allow mankind to make such a grievous error again.

However, we do. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Committee on Conscience has issued a Genocide watch for Sudan, Chechnya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Darfur. According to former U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland, the death toll is an estimated 400,000 civilians in Darfur alone.

Maybe someday, the terror like that in Auschwitz and today in Darfur, will be a thing for the history books. But for now, it lingers, bringing death and destruction along with it. However, with stories like Bernie's being shared, and Anne Frank's diary remaining one of the most widely read books in the world, there is hope. Through their lives, we can learn the consequences of intolerance and inaction. It is through them that we can change.

As Frank wrote, "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before beginning to improve the world." For Bernie, I hope that single moment starts now.