The choir sang Verdi's Requiem. This work is very memorable for Marianka even thought it is a Catholic piece. It speaks of the final judgment and pleads for mercy for the innocent who have died. On the last performance, high-ranking SS representatives, including Adolf Eichman, were sitting in the front row...
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When I was fourteen or fifteen years old, we spoke about the Holocaust in school. One of my teachers told us that his grandfather had died in a concentration camp. I was very shocked, and talked about it with my mother at home. She said, "Your grandfather was also in Auschwitz, but as a perpetrator..."
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I feel honoured to be the daughter of a German and a Jew,
because their story is one of redemption. I hope that by telling it,
I may kindle a spark of healing in others. I’m proud of my German
heritage and although the horrors of the past should not be
forgotten, we need not carry them like chains forever...
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My father, who is a Jewish holocaust survivor, sent me his
translation of part of a prayer religious Jews around the world say
before going to bed: "I herewith forgive all those who have angered
or taunted me, all those who have sinned against my person, my
wealth, my possessions or my honor..."
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As I sat by my German grandfather's deathbed in a hospital in
Hamburg some years ago, he became very distraught and kept shouting
to me to take the picture of Hitler off the wall. I told him there
was no picture of Hitler there. "Oh yes there is, take it down,
they've hung it up in the church and I'm not going there again..."
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I can still remember the first time I walked past the black
swastika sprayed on the wall with spray paint, large and boldly. As
a ninth grader, I had just moved to the North Rhine Valley with my
parents from the USA and could not believe it. So all the rumours I
had heard were true — Germany really was full of Neo-Nazis...
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You don't "visit" Auschwitz. You don't willingly enter the site
of greatest evil and suffering the planet has held. The darkness is
too great. The only way to make this journey is to discover that
goodness is always stronger than evil, and that it takes only one
act of goodness to break the death-grip of hell...
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I have been invited, with my husband, to be part of a delegation
to visit Auschwitz at the end of January, the 65th anniversary of
the liberation of the camp. I want to walk under that sign, and step
in the shadow of millions of feet that walked in that gate and never
walked out...
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Why Forgive? brings together survivors of crime,
betrayal, bigotry, and abuse – and ordinary men and women plagued by
everyday strife. Not all are ready to forgive. But all are
determined not to let anger, bitterness, and despair control their
lives.
[download
free eBook]
Eva Mozes Kor, who survived Josef Mengele's cruel twin
experiments in the Auschwitz concentration camp, shocks other
Holocaust survivors when she decides to forgive the perpetrators as
a way of self-healing.
[view the trailer] [Purchase
from Amazon]