Holocaust survivor’s speech instills important history lesson with emotion

For a few minutes, the 800 in the room could only hear the clicking of Rabbi Yisroel Hahn’s lighter as he and Holocaust survivor Marion Blumenthal Lazan lit 11 candles.

One candle for every person killed in Saturday’s attack at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Rabbi Hahn and the Chabad of Spokane hosted the Holocaust survivor’s speech Tuesday at the Spokane Convention Center. Hahn had been planning it for months, but it happened to come directly in the wake of the carnage at Tree of Life Synagogue.

“This is not just the Jewish people who were attacked,” Hahn said. “It was the Jewish faith, too.”

Lazan represents a dwindling treasure of her generation who can tell the all-important story of the Holocaust in person. Jewish people, non-Jewish people, children, elderly and everyone in between showed up to hear her firsthand account.

Wesley Bauer, 15, a home-schooled student, has been studying World War II and came to hear Lazan convey a deeper meaning of the Holocaust. Her account was a big difference from the books and teachers’ versions, he said.

“There’s a lot more emotion when you can see their face,” he said. “They’re not going to be around much longer.”

After lighting the candles, Hahn said the wick represents the person’s body, the fire represents their souls and the oil is the good deeds they have done.

“Even when the person passes away, the souls still exists,” he said.

Lazan then told her story, which has been recounted many times. She’s told it to more than a million people, written it in the book “Four Perfect Pebbles,” and was seen in the PBS documentary “Marion’s Triumph.”

It starts in Germany in the 1930s, when the anti-Semitic remarks weren’t much different than they are today, Lazan said.

Life became increasingly more difficult when Germany’s Nuremberg laws stifled her family’s freedom and subjugated them to a growing amount of hatred.

“Never did we think that the anti-Semitic incidents would lead to so much,” she said.

Jews couldn’t go to theaters or swimming pools. Then things became worse when her father’s shoe shop was vandalized, windows smashed and valuables stolen. Afterward, the government fined them for the incident.

Lazan’s family tried to escape to the United States by way of Holland, but the day before their departure, the Nazis invaded Holland and sent them to a concentration camp.

“We became acquainted with the ever-present 12-foot-high barbed wire fence,” she said.

She recalls seeing wagons piled with dead, naked bodies. She slept in crude, wooden, unheated barracks that were filled to six times over capacity, with two people sleeping in each bunk. There was no toilet paper, no soap, hardly any water, and not once did she brush her teeth. Frostbite was common in the winter, and prisoners had to urinate on their toes and fingers to warm them.

When Lazan and her family were liberated by the Russian army, she said, she was 10 years old and weighed 35 pounds.

Lazan dedicated her speech to the 11 victims in Saturday’s attack and pressed the younger generation in the room to continue telling the story of the Holocaust after she and other survivors are gone.

“The difficulties must be studied and kept alive,” she said. “Only then can we keep it from happening again. By listening, I hope that our young people prevent our past from becoming their future.”