Holocaust survivor visits Bentonville students

NWA Democrat-Gazette/BEN GOFF Susan Warsinger speaks Monday to students in the Arend Arts Center at Bentonville High School. Warsinger shared her experience of escaping from Germany as a 9-year-old after the Nazis began terrorizing Jewish communities in what became known as Kristallnacht, or the ‘Night of Broken Glass,’ in November 1938. Warsinger and her brother fled to France, before moving West ahead of the Nazi invasion, eventually making their way to the United States in 1941. For photo galleries, go to nwadg.com/photos.
NWA Democrat-Gazette/BEN GOFF Susan Warsinger speaks Monday to students in the Arend Arts Center at Bentonville High School. Warsinger shared her experience of escaping from Germany as a 9-year-old after the Nazis began terrorizing Jewish communities in what became known as Kristallnacht, or the ‘Night of Broken Glass,’ in November 1938. Warsinger and her brother fled to France, before moving West ahead of the Nazi invasion, eventually making their way to the United States in 1941. For photo galleries, go to nwadg.com/photos.

BENTONVILLE -- A Jewish survivor of the Holocaust told students about the injustice and violence she witnessed growing up in Nazi Germany and her experience fleeing her homeland as a child.

Susan Warsinger, 85, took the stage at the Arend Arts Center for two programs Monday, addressing the School District's eighth-graders in the morning and Bentonville High School students in the afternoon.

Holocaust survivors

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum honors as survivors anyone, Jewish or non-Jewish, who was displaced, persecuted or discriminated against due to the racial, religious, ethnic and political policies of the Nazis and their allies between 1933 and 1945, according to the museum’s website.

The Registry of Holocaust Survivors contains the names of more than 195,000 survivors and family members. A growing number of these people, who registered their names and historical information over the last 15 years, have died.

Source: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Warsinger, a retired teacher, has been a longtime volunteer at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where she also lives.

Warsinger lived with her parents and two younger brothers in Bad Kreuznach, a city in western Germany, at the time of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. She and her brother Joseph were sleeping in their bedroom the night of Nov. 9, 1938, when some rocks and bricks came crashing through their window. Warsinger was 9 years old at the time.

"My brother looked out the window and he said, "Susie, it's our neighbors!'" Warsinger told students.

That night came to be called Kristallnacht, or the "Night of Broken Glass," a wave of violent anti-Jewish attacks on Jewish businesses and homes that took place in Germany and other areas recently occupied by German troops.

The neighbors uprooted a telephone pole and smashed it through the front door of the apartment building where her family lived. A rock landed on the hand of Warsinger's other brother, Ernest, who was 7 months old and sleeping in his bassinet at the time, she said.

Her parents agreed after they had to leave Germany, but they couldn't find a way out. They decided to pay a woman to smuggle Warsinger and her brother Joseph across the border into neighboring France. Warsinger and her brother posed as the woman's French children.

"Can you imagine how my mother and father felt not knowing whether they'd ever see their children again?" Warsinger said. "But they wanted us to be safe."

They spent more than two years in France in a few different living situations. Warsinger went to school there and learned to speak French.

She recounted one time, shortly after the German invasion of northern France, she was living in Versailles when a German military officer had a need to speak with the city's mayor. They needed a translator, and someone happened to know Warsinger was bilingual.

"You cannot imagine how scared I was," Warsinger said. "I don't remember what they talked about. Evidently I did OK. "The German officer bent down and said, 'How do you know German so well?' And I told him the French schools are very good and I had learned it there. I felt elated I had outwitted this Nazi officer."

Finally, in mid-1941, Warsinger learned her parents were safe and living in the United States. A cousin of her father's living in New York arranged a way to get her parents to America, she said. She and her brother, along with 50 other children, were taken by boat to America. The voyage took two weeks.

Warsinger never spent time in a concentration camp but said she had relatives who died in concentration camps. Others living in Poland were rounded up, ordered to dig their own graves, and shot.

Warsinger's immediate family, however, all survived. Her brother Joseph Hilsenrath became a cardiologist. Ernest Hilsenrath, the baby of the family, went on to work for NASA. Warsinger had three daughters and nine grandchildren.

Hitler ultimately was unsuccessful in his mission to exterminate the Jews, she said.

Warsinger took numerous questions from students. One eighth-grader asked if she ever lost faith in God at the time the Nazis were persecuting Jews.

"To me, God wasn't responsible for the Holocaust," she said. "He gave men free will. I don't blame God."

Aspen Courtney, a Bentonville junior, said she was impressed by Warsinger's speech. She even took the time to jot down something Warsinger said: "We cannot be bystanders when we see injustice taking place."

Courtney said Warsinger's presentation "was a lot different from reading about (the Holocaust) in a textbook. You could understand the reality of it better."

Warsinger urged the students not to be perpetrators of injustice, and to do something about it when they witness it.

Jamie Reynolds, a sophomore, said he was thankful to Warsinger for coming to visit. He called her presentation "eye-opening."

Warsinger's presentation also impressed Shannon Paxton, the Lincoln Junior High School English and language arts teacher who received a $3,000 grant from the museum to bring Warsinger to Bentonville.

"This is an amazing opportunity for the students to hear a story about a Jewish child being persecuted," Paxton said.

Her eighth-graders study the diary of Anne Frank, the young girl who hid with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Paxton said she learns something new every year when her classes study the Holocaust.

"They're old enough to deal with it and they need to know," she said.

Warsinger also planned to speak to students of Life Way Christian School in Centerton today before heading home. She was accompanied by Emily Potter, a program assistant from the museum.

NW News on 04/28/2015

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