After six weeks of hiding in a pitch-black apartment cellar alone, the Germans had finished their roundups, and it was safe for Gerda Seifer to return to her family in the ghettos of Przemysl, Southeast Poland.
During this time, she imagined them subservient in the workforce and safely tucked away in clandestine corners as she had been.
“When I got there I asked him, ‘Daddy, how’s mom?’” Seifer said. “He took me and sat me down on the bed—we had no chairs. He had to tell me what I didn’t want to hear … they had been arrested and taken away.”
Seifer, now 87 years old, looks back on some of the horrors she experienced as a Jew during the Holocaust.
With the departure of March comes the arrival of Genocide Awareness and Prevention month, a month that is dedicated to educating the public and deterring events such as the Holocaust, the 100-year-old Armenian Genocide and the genocide in Darfur from repeating themselves.
Stories like Seifer’s serve as one of the few remaining windows to the past; a narrative reminder of the terrors that genocide inflicts on all who are unfortunate enough to be victimized by it.
Aaron Breitbart, senior researcher at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, said that it is important to first understand exactly what should be classified as genocide.
“There are other terrible atrocities that have been viewed as genocide … [such as] what was going on with Pol Pot in Cambodia … that’s what the killing fields is all about and yet, that’s not a genocide,” Breitbart said. “There you had Cambodians murdering Cambodians… Genocide refers to two different groups of people.”
Breitbart said that the underlying causes of genocide boil down to two main points.
The first point seemed obvious: hatred of a specific race or group of people. But the second point called for some elaboration.
“Of course, you need more than a victim and a perpetrator; you need everybody else out there to just sit back and let it happen,” Breitbart said. “The people who perpetrate in these kinds of things actually count on the rest of the world not doing anything about it.”
Breitbart used World War II’s genocidal icon, Adolf Hitler, as an example.
“Adolf Hitler himself said [at the Évian conference in 1938 when 32 nations gathered in France to talk about the Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Europe], ‘It’s interesting, you see all these people crying crocodile tears, but they won’t do anything about it,’” Breitbart said.
Breitbart said the politics of genocide are one of the main reasons why most genocide happens and in some cases, goes almost completely untreated.
“Politicians just basically take a look at what’s in it for them. That’s why Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt did very little about the Holocaust,” Breitbart said. “He saw that there was tremendous anti-Semitism in the country [at the time] and didn’t want it to seem like he was too “pro-Jewish.””
Gerda Seifer recalled an instance when Roosevelt declined aid to a transport ship called the St. Louis that was carrying 938 Jewish passengers attempting to escape from Nazi Germany to Havana, Cuba.
According to an article by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Cuban-bound refugees were denied leave from the ship due to a decree that had been passed by Cuban President Federico Laredo Bru. It invalidated all recently issued landing certificates, forcing most to return to Europe.
Along the way back, some passengers managed to telegraph Roosevelt in a plea for refuge, but due to decisions made by the White House and the State Department, Roosevelt never responded.
At the top of Breitbart’s list of genocide prevention stands volunteering to help people who have been victimized. He said that our voices might be a key ingredient in helping to shape the future.
“People get the leadership they deserve and the leadership supposedly reflects how the people are,” Breitbart said. “Students should realize that they form a base of millions of votes for politicians and for politicians to get those votes, they are going to have to listen.”
