Holocaust survivor recalls tale of Kristallnacht

Speaking in an event commemorating Kristallnacht, Steven Ross told an audience Thursday that it essential to teach about the Holocaust. "Little kids must know, and if they don't know they won't tell their children and their children's children," Ross said.Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) the night of Nov. 9, 1938 when mobs in Germany and Austria ransacked Jewish homes, synagogues and stores. The next day, tens of thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps.

Ross came to the United States after the war and was then illiterate. He now works as a psychologist, and has worked to erect the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston. He contributed to the memorial to American soldiers who liberated the Nazi concentration campus, which is being built inside the existing Holocaust memorial. It will open in April.

"I cherish America, and I kiss the ground that I walk on," Ross said. "I never forget those men who saved me."

The event, held in Rappaporte Treasure Hall, began as Tali Chess '05 stood behind a podium, ensconced by a dim glow of light and told the audience about her visit to Poland. On that trip, she saw concentration camps, cemeteries where murdered Jews were buried and synagogues ruined by the mobs.

Chess and Leila Belik'05 are the coordinators of the Holocaust Remembrance Committee "This was the first year that the Holocaust Remembrance Committee had a Kristallnacht event in recent memory," Belik said. "Based on the turnout and the positive response, this will be a continued tradition."

Four students - Hope Lebovitz '05, Rachel Suberi '05, Talia Landau '06 and Naomi Baumgarten '06 - clad in black stepped up. Each spoke in turn, assuming the identities of those who experienced Kristallnacht. They sought to convey the fear felt by Jews that night by describing the pieces of shattered windows that covered the beds of little children as Nazis wrecked homes, throwing people into the streets. Recorded sounds of breaking glass pierced the air as the actors presented slides of destroyed synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in Poland. A Hebrew prayer was then recited for the remembrance of the souls who were killed at the hands of the Nazis.

Speaking last, Ross periodically shed tears and made the audience cry as well. "I managed to survive by sheer coincidence," he said.

He recounted his survival as well as the deaths of most of his family. He set up displays with the names of six extermination camps, hateful phrases that the Germans used to call Jews and photographs of Holocaust victims, one of which included him.

His address was often graphic, as he described the manner in which he escaped mass killings and death by starvation. "To survive, we were resorting to cannibalism," Ross said. "We were eating each other to survive."

Ross arrived in the United States stricken with tuberculosis at the age of 16. Along with his older brother, he had been sent to 10 Nazi labor and death camps over a span of five years. In his desperation to share as much as he could of what happened, Ross said that he "cannot tell everything; only a fraction of it."

"I was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, (of) the wrong religion," he said.

Ross recalled the death "selection," the experimental death methods of the Nazis and the extreme starvation, along with other abysmal aspects of life in the Nazi concentration camps.

He showed the audience some objects from the camps: The cap he had to wear as part of his uniform; the dish he used to eat, bathe and defecate; prisoners' flimsy shoes; scissors men used to tidy themselves up before "selection"; and animal figurines made from the crushed bones of Jews. He said his mission is to "keep the images of the Holocaust alive" and "give people an inkling of what it means to be a survivor today."

"You knew were going to die, but you didn't want to die," Ross said. "The only thing that kept us alive was our religion.