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Sidney Bolkosky,
producer-editor
Mary Kay Carter
and media
engineer Greg
Taylor work on.
a Holocaust
survivor's oral
history video.

Lost Childhood

Ruth Webber's Holocaust survival story appears
with others on the UM-Dearborn Web site.

HARRY KIRS BAUM
Staff Writer

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It takes about 150 hours of work to
get one interview on the Web after the
first rough draft of a transcript of an
audio interview is written.
The staff works on about 20 tran-
scripts at a time, he said. Thirty more
are ready to go up on the Web soon.
Then they will try to add about one a
month.
Bolkosky said that at this pace, it
will take 10 years to get all the inter-
views on the Internet, but the worth
will far outweigh the work.
"If we don't use this towards serious
educational opportunities, the popular
media will take over the Holocaust,"
he said, "and that would be disas-
trous."

Spreading The Word

Some 330 hours of audiotape and 60
hours of video stored in the Mardigian
Library will be used for "Aspects of the
Holocaust," a new class that will be
offered this spring as part of the uni-
versity's REACH program, designed
for students who can't come regularly
to the classroom.
Following a syllabus, students check
out video lectures, watch four inter-
views and take two essay exams for
credit. The course will be offered each
semester.
The course took 2 72 years to put
together, Bolkosky said. "Six months
to make 15 lectures. Then came the
rough part — cutting in the proper
segments of the interviews, then get-
ting photographs and film."
Working closely with Bolkosky on
this project is Mary Kay Carter, a for-
mer student and now an adjunct pro-
fessor at U-M Dearborn.
"To use those [interviews] in an aca-
demic setting brings, on a very person-
al level, the events of the Holocaust to
the minds and understanding of the
students in a way that I don't think any
other university is able to do," she said.

The fact that this project hails from
Dearborn does not go unnoticed.
"After all, this is Henry Ford's
home," he said, referring to the
automaker's virulent anti-Semitism
prior to World War II.. "When a per-
son checks out a tape here, I just have
a wonderful feeling about it. We've
had some Holocaust conferences in
Ford's house, and it makes me feel
really, really good."

Preserving History

Bolkosky had no immediate family
members victims of the Holocaust,
but became involved in survivor testi-
mony in an indirect way.
As a graduate student at Wayne
State University, he became intrigued
by a six-page passage in a book about
Jerusalem that mentioned what
European Jews were like in the 1920s.
He wrote a book on German Jews
between the World Wars called "A
Distorted Image" for his dissertation
in 1972.
Fast forward to 1978, when various
news talk shows called WSU for com-
ments on the Holocaust "after that ter-
rible Holocaust mini-series was made
on television," Bolkosky said. The uni-
versity press office contacted him to
answer questions.
Then he was asked to serve on a
Jewish Community Council of
Metropolitan Detroit committee for
Holocaust education. This was around
the same time the Holocaust
Memorial Center in West Bloomfield
was built. The HMC needed volun-
teers to help on an oral history proj-
ect. Because Bolkosky already had
interviewed some 50 people for his
dissertation, he volunteered.
Eventually, he began interviewing
survivors for the university as a way of
getting their stories out to a wider

NOT To BE FORGOTTEN on page 24

uth Muschkies Webber of
West Bloomfield was a 5-year-
old child when the Germans
rolled into her hometown of
Ostrowiec, Poland, in 1939.
Four years and six ghettos and
camps later, she was liberated from the
children's ward at Auschwitz. Reunited
with her mother and sister, they made
a new life in the United States.
Professor Sidney Bolkosky, who inter-
viewed Webber in 1987 for his Voice-
Vision: Holocaust Survivor Oral Histories
project at the University of Michigan-
Dearborn, believes Webber is the youngest
concentration camp survivor in the area.
She's spoken to students in area
schools and has been interviewed as part
of a film shown at the U.S. Holocaust
Museum in Washington, D.C.
Below is part of the transcript offered on
http://holocaust.urnd.umich.edu/

decided not to either and, uh, we
never heard of the other children. We
don't know what happened to them ...
'And, uh, we had some people come
to the block also all dressed up with
white bands with a red cross. Prior to
that visit, they were always making sure
that we were nice and clean and that the
beds are made clean and that, uh, we
should — we were in a nice way told we
should appear that we're happy. And you
do what you were told."
Do you remember any of the chil-
dren disappearing occasionally? You
said there were twins there.
"Yeah, these were twins. There were
children taken and brought back con-
tinuously.
"It was really the lowest point in my
life where I felt that, what was the use of
surviving? Up until then, you heard peo-
ple say all the time, "Oh, we've got to
live, we've got to survive, we've got tell
the world what is going on that people
are treated like animals, that there is all
this killing going on for no reason, all
this burning, all this ... we've got to live."
"At that time, at that point of my
life, I really felt it wasn't worth it." ❑

How many children were in your
block?
"I really don't know. Maybe 100 —
maybe 150."
Were there any adults in this block?
Ruth Webber holds the famous photograph
"No. The block that I was in, it
of her and other children just after the
was just children. After I was sepa-
liberation of Auschwitz.
rated from my mother."
How did they separate the children?
"They just walked in and they
said all children step forward and
we'll take them to the children's
block. They'll be better fed there,
they'll be taken care of, and the par-
ents, the mother will have a chance
to sleep so she can work better. And
they took us away. And that was
that ...
Uh, I remember one incident, two
Germans came in, I don't know if one
of them was Mengele, as I mentioned
to you once before, we never looked
up at Mengele, he was a tall man,
because we were afraid to meet his
eyes. We didn't want him to see us, so
we always saw the beautiful shiny
boots that he was wearing and the
buckle, but you kind of were afraid to
look up any further. They came in
and they said they needed 50 children
for a transfer to go to Belgium ... "
You decided not to go?
"I decided not to go. In fact, a
couple of other friends of mine

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2002

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