By Katherine Leonard, TWR Youth Action Fellow ‘20
AN EVENT COMMEMORATING THE 76TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ UNITED TWO SPEAKERS WHOSE FAMILIES EXPERIENCED THE HOLOCAUST IN DRASTICALLY DIFFERENT WAYS.
This past Wednesday, January 27, marked the 76th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Although so much time has passed, the need to stay connected to those who experienced the Holocaust first-hand remains critical. That’s what Noemie Lopian and Derek Niemann intended to do in the Together We Remember Coalition and Heidelberg University’s event on Wednesday, “Speaking Across the Divide: Growing Up in the Shadow of the Holocaust.”
Lopian and Niemann are both tied to the Holocaust, only in very different ways. Lopian is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, while Niemann is the grandson of a Holocaust perpetrator.
The connection between these two individuals and their shared determination to spotlight stories of the Holocaust offers the answer to the question of how one can continue practicing collective memory, even as fewer survivors are alive to tell their stories.
Dr. Noemie Lopian began the event by sharing stories of her childhood in Munich, Germany. She was unaware of her hometown’s significance in Hitler’s regime, as well as the tragedies tied to it. It wasn’t until she was a teenager that she learned what the Holocaust was through a school lesson.
Lopian’s parents never spoke to her of the Holocaust or their experiences of persecution at the hands of the Nazi regime. Her mother was only 10 when she was held at gunpoint by SS officers in France. Her father was 19 when he was taken to a labor camp, the first of 7 labor camps he was forced into. Lopian grew up knowing she was Jewish but completely unaware that her parents were brutalized by a regime determined to ensure the end of the existence of Jews.
She eventually found her late father’s memoirs but didn’t read them until she was 36 years old. Lopian said that she knew she had a choice to either read the book or close it, but she felt that if she closed it, she would also be closing it on her father, her community, and all those whose voices deserved to be uplifted.
Lopian compiled the memoirs into a book titled The Long Night. Her father’s writing now serves as a way for people to remember the horrors of the Holocaust to make sure “never again” becomes a reality.
Derek Niemann has a similar goal of making sure his grandfather’s story did not go untold. Like Lopian, Niemann grew up unaware of his ties to the Holocaust. He didn’t discover his grandfather’s true story until he was 50, and the discovery was made through an internet search.
Niemann revealed his grandfather’s story through pictures that his grandfather had taken. These pictures spanned 70 years, and they varied from average family photos of smiling children to documentations of the Nazi regime. Niemann’s grandfather captured sites seen in history books, such as Nazi flags being waved through the streets. One photograph showed the grounds of what would become the Dachau concentration camp, where his grandfather later worked.
Some of the most chilling photos were those that did not capture activities related to the Holocaust, at all. One photo shows a group of adults smiling at a New Year’s Eve party, celebrating despite the fact that Kristallnacht occurred just six weeks earlier. Another captures Niemann’s grandfather gardening in his Nazi uniform. These normal activities shown in the photographs point to one of Niemann’s main takeaways from his family’s story.
“They were ordinary people who persuaded themselves that what they were doing was right,” Niemann said. “That is the lesson for me: that this can happen to anyone. Anyone can do the kind of things that my grandfather did.”
As the distance between us and the Holocaust grows with each year, speakers like Noemie Lopian and Derek Niemann remind us why the stories of the Holocaust need to be shared. The Holocaust is an inherently human story. It is important to remind people to understand the Holocaust as an atrocity done to humans, by humans. Hearing two people whose families were on the opposite sides of the Holocaust speak together, united against hatred, showed us the power of listening to different stories.
Both speakers left viewers with a call to action: Talk to people who are not like you.
“When you are not in your echo chamber, your learning goes up exponentially. Without difference, we don’t really grow,” Lopian said.
People have a choice to either be open to learning from the Holocaust or to try and forget the past, therefore denying the opportunities to learn lessons from what happened. In opening your mind to stories you are unfamiliar with, you will allow yourself to understand. You are more likely to embrace understanding instead of ignorance, and kindness instead of hatred.
Those alive today who are still willing to share their stories pass this knowledge to us, who have a responsibility to continue with the same vigilance. We remember stories like those of Lopian and Niemann’s family so that we act with courage and determination to ensure that history does repeat itself. We do not just hope for a future where there are no more new stories of atrocities like the Holocaust -- we actively work towards it.
Kate Leonard is a third-year student at Fordham University in the Bronx, NY studying Humanitarian Action and Italian. She is a Youth Action Network Fellow and Executive Editor of Together We Remember’s blog. Her passion for human rights has inspired her to engage in activist work relating to criminal justice and migration.
Banner Image Source: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jan/29/nazis-tried-to-kill-kindness-holocaust-survivors-grandson-ss-officer