Love conquers all
Holocaust survivor triumphs
by Christopher Key
There is a quaint myth that I was raised with. It’s called journalistic objectivity. It is a myth because journalists are human beings and incapable of objectivity unless they have lost touch with what makes them human. In an age when objective journalism is a laughable oxymoron, it comforts me to know that I don’t have to pretend to pay homage to that standard. Trying to do so after hearing a talk by Holocaust survivor Noémi Ban would be an exercise in futility and a waste of words.
The immensely talented German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl is best remembered for what has been cited as the greatest propaganda film of all time, The Triumph of the Will. The cosmic irony is that the real triumph of the will is demonstrated by survivors of the Holocaust Riefenstahl helped create. Noémi Ban exemplifies that triumph. The triumph of love over hate.
Tonight, she brought that triumph home to a standing-room-only audience at Western Washington University. I cannot begin to imagine the strength it takes for one who has survived such horrors to refuse the temptation to return the hate. Ban not only does that, but uses her immense talents as a teacher to bring it to an audience that only knows the Holocaust through history books. I am one of them. I was born after World War II. It is an immense and very moving privilege to hear history from one who experienced it firsthand. There are very few Holocaust survivors left and it behooves us listen to those who are still here, reminding us of the consequences of hate and how Holocausts still happen. Ban’s presentation was sponsored by the Northwest Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Ethnocide Education, www.wce.wwu.edu/nwche/
The presentation began with a trailer from the upcoming movie “My Name is Noémi,” directed by the immensely talented WWU professor Jim Lortz. That film will debut on January 20, 2009, surely not a coincidence given the significance of that date
A native of Szeged, Hungary, Noémi Ban was 21 when the Nazis marched into Debrecen, Hungary, on March 19, 1944. Ultimately her father was sent to a forced labor camp and she and her family were sent on a transport to Auschwitz arriving on July 1, 1944. Immediately separated from her family (where they became victims of the Nazi genocide) Noémi spent nearly four months in Auschwitz before being picked by Dr. Joseph Mengele to be transferred to a sub-camp of Buchenwald to work at a bomb factory. Escaping during the forced march to Bergen-Belsen in April of 1945, Noémi and eleven of her campmates were found by a soldier from Patton’s army who informed them of their freedom.
Her story tonight ended at that point, but there’s a lot more to tell. She went back to Hungary after the war only to see the invasion of her country by the USSR in the 1950s. Once again, she escaped tyranny in rather dramatic fashion and once again she refused to hate those who made her life a continuing torment.
That triumph of the will caused tonight’s audience to break into spontaneous applause at many points and resulted in a standing ovation at the end. That’s gratifying because our society continues to live in denial of genocide. We deny that it can happen in America, but it did. Just ask any Native American. We deny that it can happen now, but it does, in Uganda, in Iraq, in Darfur.
Leni Riefenstahl died in 2003 at the age of 101. Her undeniable gifts as a cinematographer were overshadowed by how she used those talents to create the fear that is the basis of hatred. Those twisted gifts live on in the right-wing media that poisons our political and social dialogue in America today.
My companion for the evening was a dear friend who grew up during World War II and vividly remembers being called a “dirty Jew” on the streets of her hometown. Ban’s presentation had her in tears and provoked my own tears at how badly we treat each other. But Ban’s message is one of hope, one of forgiveness and redemption.
I asked my companion how I could possibly write about this. “Oh, my God,” I said.
“Precisely,” she said.
http://www.sharingishealing.com/
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