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Wise Words Spring From Memories of a Horror
(Continued from UNH Today home page.)
10/11/2007
Exhibit tells story of Holocaust memorial
Mary E. O’Leary , Register Topics Editor
WEST HAVEN — Unlike 1.5 million other children, Martin Schiller survived the Holocaust, liberated at age 12 from Buchenwald, a Nazi death camp in Germany, by American soldiers.
Speaking at the University of New Haven Wednesday, Schiller said he doesn’t have to conjure up an antiseptic movie moment to find the words to express what freedom meant to him, particularly on that day, April 11, 1945, "when his long nightmare ended."
"Freedom to me encompasses so many interrelated blessings, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom from hunger, freedom from fear and most of all, freedom from the sword of Damocles," said the survivor, a UNH graduate and retired engineer living in Fairfield.
But with that freedom, Schiller said, comes the responsibility to keep alive the memory of the six million Jews killed, gassed and starved by the Third Reich in Europe during World War II.
He was at UNH to bring attention to a campus exhibit, "Memory & Legacy," which tells the story of the development of the New Haven Holocaust Memorial, the first such memorial in the country to be built on public land.
It was erected in 1977 by a group of Holocaust survivors and their children, with contributions from a cross-section of New Haveners, and built on land at Whalley and West Park avenues donated by the city.
Now, three decades later, new contributors, in addition to some of the survivors and several who helped get it built, have put together a traveling multimedia presentation that includes oral history interviews, photos and documents about the memorial.
Doris Zelinsky, one of the original planners of the Holocaust memorial and the daughter of survivors, said the monument has deteriorated over the years.
To Zelinsky, one of the important aspects of the memorial was the contributions of many from all ethnic groups. "It was a whole city affair," she said, quoting one of the survivors.
Zelinsky related a story about a note and a $5 money order.
She said both were left at the exhibit when it was on display in the New Haven City Hall atrium this summer, as hundreds of the city’s newest immigrants waited in line for hours to get a municipal ID card.
Edwin Velez and his family were among those waiting who took the time to read the exhibit and make a connection with its message.
"In honor of the people who passed away in the Holocaust, be strong and God bless," Velez wrote.
This year, Schiller, 74, wrote a book about his harrowing experiences during the war, "Bread, Butter and Sugar: A Boy’s Journey Through the Holocaust and Postwar Europe." All the proceeds will go to support memorials around the world.
"I raise my voice again and again ... in the hope that I will touch the conscience of at least a few, forever praying that a future generation will offer the needed shoulder to keep back the flood of indifference and intolerance that continues to plague this fragile spaceship Earth," Schiller said.
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