EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
Exposing The Horror
S
am Offen talks not from notes but from the heart
about the inhumanity he endured in the darkest
days of the Holocaust.
The Birmingham furrier and Krakow native is
now 81. The bounce in his step is gone, but he's spry
enough to speak often, and graphically, about the horrors
he somehow survived a long time ago.
Today, Offen lives in West Bloomfield with his wife,
Hyla. They have two children.
He and I spoke last week at the Detroit Jewish News
offices in Southfield amid the 60th anniversary of the
Warshaw Ghetto Uprising, depicted in
Roman Polanski's current movie, The
Pianist.
"It's not an easy task to constantly relive
such horrible memories of being in concen-
tration camps for almost six years," Offen
said. "But it is necessary. While I still can, I
feel it is my obligation to educate."
It sure is.
ROBERT A.
Too few attendees of the Detroit Jewish
SKLAR
community's annual Yom HaShoah, or
Editor
Holocaust Remembrance Day, observance
are younger people who aren't children or .
grandchildren of survivors.
Locally, our youth, whatever their religion, usu-
ally learn about the Shoah by reading Anne Frank:
The Dial), of a Young Girl or seeing the Jewish
Ensemble Theatre's stage production based on it;
by watching-a film or documentary based on the
despair; or _by visiting the Holocaust Memorial
Center. More than 100,000 schoolchildren visit
the HMC in West Bloomfield each year.
I'm heartened that the world seems more aware
of and willing to learn about Hitler's sadism. Says
Offen
HMC Rabbi Charles Rosenzveig: "Education is
all-important. It's our duty to show the world what
humanity can do." •
A loose-leaf binder full of testimonials attests to Offen's
popularity as a public speaker. Clearly, his reflections on
manipulation, torture, distress and death move the children
he meets with and their wide-eyed innocence humbles him.
"These letters," he said, "emphasize the importance of
#
what they learned that day — how i t changed their lives
and their understanding of what the Holocaust was really
like."
Student after student talked about how they had no idea
the Holocaust was so brutal, so massive or so daunting.
Last May, then an eighth-grader at Tappan Middle School
in Ann Arbor, Kevin Callender wrote: "You are brave to
reach back in your memories to teach young adults. You
never know -- you might prevent another Holocaust. That
is what I'm thankful for.
Subhuman Subsistence
The Nazis took Offen from a small two-bedroom apart-
ment in Krakow and imprisoned him in a nearby Jewish
ghetto when he was 18. He survived in German concentra-
tion- camps from 1939 to 1945, avoiding execution like
millions of Jews and smaller numbers of gypsies, homosexu-
als and people derogatively called "cripples."
The Nazis forced him to make steel and munitions, and
to mine for salt. One of his stops, the Plaszow forced labor
camp, was recreated in Steven Spielberg's 1993 movie,
Schindler's List.
In the camps, Offen lived on a bowl of coffee, a bowl of
soup and a piece of bread each day, causing his weight to
plummet to 70 pounds at one point.
He tells the story of how he had to whip his best friend
with a camp guard's steel-tipped whip, and then was
whipped by his best friend, so that both were humiliated to
the guard's delight.
He also tells of Plaszow Commander Amon Goeth who
would have two German shepherd dogs attack the first pris-
oner he saw each day, then shoot the person dead when he
fell. Offen surprised himself when, while fixing a road, the
dogs attacked him, but he drew on God's will to repel their
gnawing at his weary bones and keep digging. "And for
some reason," Offen said, the commander "didn't kill me. I
don't know why."
His liberation came three months before World War II
ended when eight Allied tanks penetrated the hellhole he
was locked up in. The liberating soldiers announced simply,
"You are free now" — and shared chocolate and other edi-
bles before going back to combat.
Fifty Offen family members were among the Six Million
who died as a result of Hitler's "Final Solution to the Jewish
Question," but Sam's two brothers, Nathan and Bernard,
also survived.
"I still consider myself very lucky," Offen said. "It is rare
in the annals of the Holocaust that three siblings
from one family survive. There were literally hun-
dreds of thousands of families that completely per-
ished from this Earth, thus not leaving even one per-
son to say Kaddish for them."
A Captivating Soul
I'm convinced that Offen's desire to teach springs
from a perspective that only survivors have.
So I took the time to chat with him when he came
by to tell me he would speak to 1,500 `employees of
General Motors at a Yom HaShoah program on April 29 at
the Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Center. "This was part
of the Cadillac Motor Division's diversity program in con-
junction with the UAW," he explained.
Offen is easy to admire. Over the years, he has spoken to
hundreds of school, campus and community groups in
hopes that younger generations will never forget Nazi
Germany's attempted genocide of European Jewry. "For
humankind's sake," he said, "I pray history does not repeat
itself."
Offen practices the highest level of tikkun olam (repairing
the world) by teaching so passionately about the Shoah
despite the emotional and physical pain he suffered because
of it.
Genocide attempts now are couched in the euphemism
"ethnic cleansing," a culture of hate that has swept Kosovo,
Sudan, Iraq, Bosnia and other beleaguered lands. A prime
example of such hate is the Palestinian terror that's intended
to expel Jews from Israel, the Jewish homeland.
Engaging and insightful, Offen believes in the ecumenical
principle that good people — Jews and non-Jews together
— can outsmart evildoers through knowledge and resolve.
That's why he's so eager for Detroit Jewry's Holocaust
museum — a beacon of enlightenment — to move to new,
larger quarters in Farmington Hills later this year.
As he put it: "It is in this spirit of never forgetting that
the new Holocaust Center is rising — reminiscent of sur-
vivors rising from the ashes." ❑
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2003
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