Jo-Ellyn Decker speaks with survivor Martin Weiss about the documents she uncovered about his family through the International Tracing Service archive. Decker is a program manager for Visiting Scholar Programs at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. (Direct quote from https://engage.ushmm.org)
The video above features the response of a living holocaust survivor who I had met a few months ago. Here he is viewing the death records of his father that were not previously available to him. It is important to note that many who survived never felt a sense of closure to the loss of love ones.
When I met Martin and felt the hand of a living miracle in my own, I cried from the overwhelming sense of compassion for a complete stranger. We all have very unique outstanding moments in our lives, meeting Marty was one of mine.
Marty is a living part of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. where I recently lead 11 college students to work on their spring break serving people who are homeless, displaced or otherwise lacking resources. The visit to the Museum was an experience of a lifetime that concluded our trip, and an experience I will never forget.
I have highlighted the excerpt from the journal report I composed following the trip that is specific to the moment I met Martin Weiss which reveals how special he is to sit at a table waiting for inquisitive minds to extract and learn from Martin's view.
Wherever you are Marty.....Thank You. You made me value the gift of human life so much more.
I was thankful for time alone to ponder one part of world history that I feel so passionate about. After I spent an hour in a small section of the museum which offered comparison to present day genocide, I discovered two men seated at a table marked “real survivors” where I would personally speak to a man by the name of Martin Weiss who was 14 at the time of the Holocaust. As he extended his hand to shake mine, I was overwhelmed with sadness as I knew I was holding the hand and looking into the eyes of a man who TRULY suffered. I cried and told him he was a miracle and as humble and comical as he is, he sort of chuckled and said “well, I suppose I am” and he smiled. Of all things he could say to me at that point he spoke about food. All the while I’d been walking around Washington DC with new images of picky homeless people sifting through sandwiches and scoffing at cucumbers, bypassing salads, and college students bickering over what places had been selected for dinner locations and who had questioned my reasons for making 15 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that morning which I would ask all of us to split the burden of carrying around that day to give out to the homeless people on the streets rather than to throw it away before we boarded a plane home…….I became FURIOUS at humanity as Martin explained what it was like to “eat” in a concentration camp. He described the smells of fermenting mysterious substances that would be poured into a trough for he and others in the camp to feed on. He said you don’t question what might appear to be a food source put in front of you, you gagged and you gulped what was the most putrid sour smelling wet mass of a substance in front of you, and you ate, hoping you would survive the abdominal cramping and vomiting that would follow in the next day or two.Many were not so lucky to survive at all. Martin spoke to me of what it was like to create a family of his own after watching his mother, father, brothers and sisters die in the camps, he said he raised his children without them ever hearing him speak of being in the camps because he did not want them to develop and form of hate or negativity in their lives and that “attitude was everything” needed for survival. I thanked him for his time and proceeded through the special exhibit I was scheduled to walk through. There are no words that give validity to my experience there that day.
Written by: Kristy Medo
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