Holocaust survivor and Boston University alumnus Sidney Handler recounted his experiences living and struggling to survive in Poland during Nazi occupation during World War II in a lecture on Wednesday.
The 1958 School of Management graduate shared tales about his “life in the ghetto” of Vilna, Poland, the Ponary massacre and his struggle for life during the Holocaust to about 50 students in honor of the Hillel House’s Holocaust Remembrance Series held at the Franklin Lounge.
“Most of the people were killed in small camps or just in the forest,” Handler said. “All you typically hear about are the concentration camps, but there were a lot of Jews who were just taken to be shot in the forest.”
Handler said his aunt, grandmother and many others he knew were killed in Ponary, and 75,000 people were buried there.
Ariel Bengio, Hillel’s student board president and a College of Arts and Sciences senior, stressed the importance of keeping the memories of Holocaust victims alive.
“Never forget the tragedy,” Bengio said.
When the Soviet Union pushed back east and their occupation in Poland ended, the Germans invaded Vilna and herded at least 60 thousand Jewish Polish people into a ghetto, Handler said.
“There was malnutrition, no food and no meat, and everybody had lice because the sanitary conditions were horrible,” Handler said.
Handler described his experiences in a concentration camp and hiding in random houses.
“My mother shoved me down the stairs, and I just stood there in the closet as a bayonet brushed by me and as I heard the kids yelling and crying out,” Handler said. “After that, children couldn’t be seen because we weren’t supposed to have survived.”
He recalled the first execution he watched at a camp.
“One morning, they lined us all up to witness the hanging of three people where two survived,” he said. “But it wasn’t a problem for the Germans…‘Boom, boom’ and they were shot dead.”
A few weeks later, Handler said he found himself and his mother hiding and “lying like a deck of cards” in an attic.
“We ran out of water, so we drank each other’s urine,” Handler said. “Naturally I was getting weaker.”
Handler remembered finally crawling down from the attic when he and his mother escaped the camp with the help of a Polish man.
In tears, Handler recalled how his memories burden him and flood back to his head each day even having lived in America since October 1947.
“Not a single day goes by where I don’t think about lying up in the attic listening to the mother’s tears and gunshots,” Handler said. “Every day when I’m alone in the car, going some place, when I get up in the morning, when I shave, I think about it.”
The Hillel House’s series on the Holocaust culminates May 2, when students and professors will gather for a candle-lighting ceremony at Marsh Plaza in remembrance of lives lost in the Holocaust.
“It’s really important to hear them speak because we are the last generation that will be able to,” said CAS freshman Tova Ramelson, Hillel’s student board vice president of culture and education.
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