Holocaust survivor shares love

While many agree that remembering the Holocaust is the only way to prevent it from happening again, it nevertheless raises an important question: Do we have to face the ghosts of our past in order to move on to the future?

To Noémi Ban, a Holocaust survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, sharing her story empowers everybody with tools to discuss the lessons of history and the responsibilities we all have to future generations.

Yet, she delivered a much powerful message to Taipei American School (TAS) students during her visit to Taiwan last week: Despite losing her family members to Nazi genocide and despite suffering incomprehensible hardship at Auschwitz, she does not have hate in her heart.

“If I wouldn't have had love in my heart, I wouldn't be free because I would be the prisoner of my own hate,” she told The China Post on Oct. 30.

“I cannot live that way anymore,” she said, adding that sharing her experience has eventually helped her to heal.

Born Schönberger Noémi to Schönberger Samu and Schönberger Juliska in Szeged, Hungary, Noémi Ban was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp with her mother, grandmother, thirteen year-old sister and 6 month-old baby brother following the German invasion and occupation of Hungary.

All of her family members in Auschwitz were killed, while her father was sent to a labor camp and she was transferred by Dr. Josef Mengele to the Buchenwald concentration camp to work in a bomb factory.

Asked how she survived such hardships, she remarked: “You don't have to have been in an Auschwitz prison to have problems, kids have problems, the only thing is how you handle it.”

“We don't give in, we keep on going, and that made me survive, and that's what I realize every single time when I speak,” she noted.

Without a doubt, meeting Ban in person made the Holocaust real for students.

“I was dying, I was dehydrated, I lost weight, they shaved my head, […] we had one rag on us, nothing else, so they gave us some soup, which had medicine in it to stop the menstruations,” she said with a heavy heart, recalling three of her friends who could not have children later because of such treatment. “They were so destroyed.”

Yet, she remarked that she might have had a very strong body as she has two sons, five grandchildren and six great grandchildren, and was able to come to Taiwan to share her experience in person.

Recalling her experience in the concentration camp and her relationship to God, she said: “When you are weak, you don't think about books and God and religion, nothing, you just exist.”

“However, that's why maybe I survived, because some of the people around me, they were saying: 'How can God do this to us? Does God know and the whole world doesn't know?' I remember – I don't know where I got the strength – saying: 'God has nothing to do with that!' Human beings are doing that,” she went on. “My relation with God did not change.”

Despite her testimony on what happened during the Holocaust, media have warned of the growing influence of those who reject the Holocaust story that millions of European Jews, including children, were systematically exterminated during the Second World War.

“I have many reasons to talk about the Holocaust. Number one, to teach people what happened. The second reason is because of these people who say that it didn't happen. I would like to see these people eye-to-eye because I've been there, I suffered there, and I lost my dear ones there. Nobody should tell me that it didn't happen.”

“Thanks God, I am still alive, and I am a witness,” she added, promising to keep on sharing her experience with young generations for the years to come.

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