Students remember Holocaust

Even though wind steadily blew over UCF's Reflecting Pond Thursday night, about 75 candles still burned in memory of Krystallnacht and the victims of the Holocaust.

This came after "A Journey Through Time," a Holocaust memorial program led by UCF students Brittany Deutch and Arielle Ozery.

"We just wanted to commemorate the memory of the Holocaust the best we could." Ozery, a sophomore interpersonal studies major, said. "This day was a week since the day of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, and we wanted to bring awareness of the day to the community."

Kristallnacht was the first night of action the Nazi army took against the Jewish people of Germany and parts of Austria. Almost every Jewish shop, home, and village was destroyed and ransacked by the German SA army. Almost 1,700 synagogues were destroyed, and 300 were set on fire.

Ozery and Deutch took UCF students and professors on a journey through the Holocaust that began on Nov. 9, 1938 and didn't end until the summer of 1945. Students watched and saw it all.

"Imagine waking up one morning, walking outside, and seeing that your shop has been destroyed," Deutch said. "Anti-Semitic remarks written all over your walls, and soldiers in uniform laughing with no shame, because everything they just did was legal."

Students sat in silence as they watched testimonies of Holocaust survivors projected on screen front of the Reflecting Pond.

"I just don't want anything like this to ever happen again," Ted Greenberg, graduate creative writing student said. "I wanted to be there to remember the survivors and those who were lost. Humanity learns from history."

UCF judaic studies professor, Kenneth Hanson, gave students statistics, others spoke on issues certain people faced. But only Helen Greenspun could tell the story from a first-person perspective.

She sat silently throughout the program; she stood only to light the first of six commemorative candles, hers in remembrance of the victims who survived the darkest days of her people.

"I am only here because of God," she said after the program.

As a teenager in Poland, Greenspun evaded the Nazis by moving to a farm near her hometown where she stayed hidden until 1942.

"The Polish farmer coached me and [my brother] on how to pray and cross ourselves so as to appear Catholic. We would often sneak into Chmielnik to visit our family and bring them food."

Greenspun was eventually captured and sent to Dachau, a concentration camp in Germany, where she stayed until the Jews were liberated in spring of 1945.

She is a regular visitor to UCF's campus and is deeply involved with the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida in Maitland.

"To the people who said this never happened, what do they say to the people who lost their families? What do you say to people like me who stood next to people who were killed by the Nazis for nothing? I was thankful to be alive back then, and I'm just [as] thankful to be here today," Greenspun said.