The task facing octogenarian Helen Farkas was formidable. Sitting alone at a plain wooden desk, Farkas had to convey the horrors of the Holocaust — the harrowing experience etched in her flesh and seared into her memory — to a group of teenagers whose own youthful countenances showed few traces of history.
To further complicate matters, many of the teens, who were among the students attending lectures about the Holocaust last week at the Jewish Community High School of the Bay in San Francisco, were a different ethnicity than the Hungarian-born Farkas. There were Asian, African American and Latino kids, many of whom may have had their own take on prejudice.
So Farkas’ task became this: how to remove the Holocaust from the dusty pages of history and make it real for the students? Why should they care? Farkas had only one real choice: to go for the guts.
And that’s exactly what she did.
“We were on a train going to Auschwitz for three days,” Farkas said. “There were about 80 or 90 of us in one car with very little ventilation. If we wanted to go to the toilet, we had to pass around a pan and do our business in front of everyone. And we were given no opportunity to empty the pans out, so we all had to live with the stench for three days.
“The trip should have taken a lot less time, but our train had to pull over to allow more important transport trains to go by.”
Farkas paused and collected her thoughts.”We were less than animals.”
She paused again, and looked at the audience. “How would that make you feel?”
When the train carrying Farkas and her family finally made it to Auschwitz, Farkas described “a tall, elegantly dressed” SS officer who — with a simple flick of a finger — directed some people to hard labor, and others to certain death.
It was Farkas’ brief encounter with the infamous Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s “Doctor of Death.”
After Mengele haphazardly condemned Farkas’ parents to death, the 19-year-old looked back one more time at her mother.
“When I think of my mother, I always remember that last look on her face, as her two daughters were lead away from her forever.
“If that were you, how would you feel?”
Some of the teens cried, some shifted in their seats nervously and a few weren’t paying attention at all.
The lecture was part of a three-hour series of seminars called “To Honor Their Memory,” which featured speakers such as Ralph Samuels, who talked about the Kindertransport. Sponsored by the Holocaust Center of Northern California, it tried to bridge the gap between kids and people whose lives were directly impacted by the Shoah. Other programs focused on the Armenian genocide, prejudice on campuses and Jewish partisan fighters.
After the event, a few who heard Farkas speak testified both to the profundity and pratfalls of lecturing about the Holocaust.
“It’s sad, but we’ve heard it all before,” said Yesenia Jiminez, a ninth-grader at John O’Connor High School in San Francisco.
“Yeah, it would be different if one of your kids, or someone you knew, went through it,” chimed in Megan Anduja, also a ninth-grader at John O’Connor High.
Anduja and Jiminez looked at each other briefly before continuing.
“But you have to give it up to the lady for surviving all that,” Jiminez said.
“Yeah, she wasn’t afraid to tell her story, especially in front of kids that she didn’t even know,” Anduja added.
“She had courage but it goes deeper than that,” Jiminez commented. “I don’t know what the word is exactly. … But it’s like she’s still here, you know?”