When David Gewirtzman was 13, he celebrated his bar mitzvah in a Polish ghetto during World War II, while fellow Jews died of starvation and disease around him.
“Every morning, I’d wake up and see corpses in the street covered with newspapers,” he said. “Children … eight years old … not able to live any longer, their ribs showing through their skin, falling to the ground, dying.”
About 120 students packed into the Prince George’s Room of the Stamp Student Union on Wednesday night to hear Gewirtzman, a Holocaust survivor, speak alongside Eugenie Mukeshimana, a Rwandan genocide survivor. The event – organized by a variety of student groups and called “Remembering the Past for the Sake of the Future” – featured the pair talking about their experiences with genocide, outlooks on life and hopes for the future.
“Our goal is to create a different world than the one we used to know,” Gewirtzman said.
The Nazis exterminated most of the 8,000 Jews in Gewirtzman’s hometown of Losice, Poland. After the officer who captured Gewirtzman took pity on him and rescued his family from a work camp, he lived in a hole under a pigsty.
“In this hole – which we called the grave – we existed for two years,” Gewirtzman said. Often, there were “rats running back and forth over our bodies,” he added.
Gewirtzman’s brother spent those two years hiding in a haystack. When the Russians liberated Poland, he could barely speak or walk.
“All I can say is that I’m an optimist,” Gewirtzman said. “I don’t hate anybody.”
Mukeshimana also spoke about her past. She was eight months pregnant when members of the Hutu majority started slaughtering the Tutsi, a minority ethnic group, in 1994 as part of the Rwandan Civil War. Mukeshimana, a Tutsi, survived by hiding with Hutu families and bribing her would-be killers.
At one point, Mukeshimana hid with a family who did not want their children to know she was there, for fear they would reveal her presence. She could only come out for short periods of time when the children were away.
“The luxury of things we do in a very normal way, [such as] taking a shower, using the bathroom, eating when you feel like eating, was over,” Mukeshimana said.
Mukeshimana’s father, sister and husband died in the genocide, along with hundreds of thousands of other Tutsi. She survived with her child, whom she gave birth to in the backyard of one of the families she stayed with.
“The situation was the same as every Tutsi family I knew of, so we had just to go on,” Mukeshimana said.
Sophomore psychology major Shira Alevy, who organized the event, drew inspiration from two experiences with intolerance. Her first experience came in her home state of New York, when she and a friend found themselves in the middle of a neo-Nazi rally. Alevy’s friend covered her Star of David necklace out of fear.
“I was scared to be Jewish, and I never knew what that felt like,” Alevy said.
Then, when someone hung a noose from a tree outside the Nyumburu Cultural Center in September, Alevy said she decided to act. She talked to a friend at Barnard College, who had heard Gewirtzman and Mukeshimana speak, and got the idea to invite the two to the campus.
“I really hope people walk away trying to learn about each other,” Alevy said. “Instead of being, ‘Oh, you’re different than me, I don’t like you,’ be, ‘Oh, you’re different than me, what can I learn from you?'”
Alevy, with the help of fellow CIVICUS member Matthew Wynter, then organized support from Hillel, CIVICUS, the Black Student Union, STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, the NAACP, Tzedek, Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs, BSOS, the Student Government Association and the Residence Halls Association for the event.
Though both Gewirtzman and Mukeshimana expressed hope for the future, they and students noted there are still genocides in the world today.
“It’s happening again in Darfur,” said sophomore government and politics major Ilana Frankel. “People have to wake up.”
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