 "Photo: Patrick Fouhy")
A commemoration of the struggle for civil and human rights in America and Europe came together Tuesday as Sonia Weitz, a Holocaust survivor, began a presentation by dedicating her poem "What Else was Lost" in memory of Rosa Parks. Weitz, speaking for the 12th time at Boston College, said that Parks was someone who was not a bystander in the world.
As part of a long-standing tradition, Weitz spent the rest of the presentation recounting her experiences as a young girl in the Holocaust, of which she and her sister were the only survivors in an extended family of 84.
The main part of her lecture was a previously taped speech. Weitz grew up in Krakow, Poland, "pampered and protected." When the Holocaust began, her family was placed in the Krakow ghetto.
Things became worse as people who were under the age of 14 and over the age of 55 were soon taken away to camps. Weitz's mother protected her by getting her false papers that claimed she was older, but no one could protect her mother when the Nazis came to take her away. Devastated, Weitz poured all her emotions into her writing.
She and her sister were sent to a concentration camp shortly after, along with her sister. They were separated from their father and her sister's husband and sent to different camps. Weitz survived five concentration camps during the Holocaust, including Auschwitz.
Throughout the experience, she recalled that her sister was "the one great comfort to me." Her sister helped to keep her spirits up and would always try to get her an extra piece of bread. The last camp that Weitz and her sister were sent to was Mauthausen. Weitz weighed 60 pounds these days, after suffering through typhus and the death march.
This was also the camp where her father died weeks before the war ended. At that camp, she met her "black messiah," a black soldier who helped to liberate them. Weitz eventually wrote a poem about him.
After the Holocaust, it took her 40 years before she wrote her book, I Promised I Would Tell, a promise that Weitz made to her mother the night she was taken away.
Following the video, Weitz took questions from the audience, lightening up the atmosphere in the room with her humor. After one student asked about her real age when Weitz got her forged papers in Krakow, Weitz joked, "Do you have to ruin my day?" alluding to having to reveal her current age. Weitz said that she didn't want to preach to the students, but she gave her main reason for coming by citing a quote: "If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem."
"I'm hoping that you will become part of the solution," said Weitz.
Along with giving lectures, Weitz is also the founder of the Holocaust Center in Peabody, Mass., and she serves on the U.S. Holocaust memorial council.
When asked by one student if she resented her captors, Weitz said, "I'm a fairly optimistic person. I don't have that kind of hatred in my heart."
The event was sponsored by both the Emerging Leadership Program and the Hillel Student Organization.
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