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NEXT GENERATIONS Testimonials
Dear Ms. Dershaw,
I would like to take a moment to express my gratitude to you for your tireless work in the creation and the perpetuation of NEXT GENERATIONS. Your organization has facilitated my ability to achieve closure with the Holocaust. My late father was a Holocaust survivor who exhibited the common traits that most survivors possess, namely rarely discussing his Holocaust experience. A majority of my life I always had a burning desire to learn all that I could about my father’s existence during the Holocaust; however the details always remained elusive. Now thanks to NEXT GENERATIONS, I found the answers and found a venue to help educate the world about the darkest era in our recorded human history.
My father passed away on July 29, 2007. During settling his affairs I came across a pouch of old documents and photographs from his youth and his Holocaust years. I remembered seeing them on a few occasions but rarely did we discuss them in any detail. Since my siblings had minor knowledge of my father’s Holocaust experience, I decided to write a biography From Wien to America so my father’s story would be passed down from generation to generation. Now his five children, ten grandchildren, and four great grandchildren would be able to understand why he was the way he was and they could experience his life at that time through text and photographs.
After publishing From Wien to America I decided that I wanted to get involved in Holocaust education so I contacted NEXT GENERATIONS. I will never forget our initial telephone conversation that lasted forty five minutes. After speaking with you I realized that there are many individuals out there with the same set of issues that I have who are progeny of Holocaust survivors.
After I completed our phone conversation I went onto your web site and my final journey began because I discovered an article that you posted about Hiram Bingham IV. He was the Vice Consul posted in the American Embassy in Marseille, France in 1939. He was finally credited with saving two thousand Jewish people imprisoned in Camp Des Milles concentration camp in Aix-en-Provence, France towards the end of his life. When I read your posted article I immediately got the chills. Now I knew how my father escaped imminent death because almost eight thousand Jews were sent to Auschwitz from Camp Des Milles. I yelled to my wife to come into my office as I opened my book and turned to the page that had my father's “Green Card” with Hiram Bingham’s signature on it. Now the final chapter was about to be written.
Mr. Bingham passed away in 1988. If I made the discovery before his death I am sure my father and I would have paid homage to Mr. Bingham in person. My wife suggested that I try to contact one of Mr. Bingham’s children to thank their father posthumously. I was able to make the connection with Robert Kim Bingham. After compiling new information about the Bingham/Bodner connection, I published a second edition of my father’s biography that included the story of how Mr. Bingham saved my father. My father’s parents were also in Camp Des Milles and received visas to immigrate to America.
The snippets of stories that we heard as children now came back to me in living color and enabled me to fill in the blanks with great detail. The memorable story that my father told us was that an American sent for my father and had the police bring him to the American Embassy in leg irons, hand cuffs, dressed in filthy prison garb, and did not have a bath for one month. The American official ordered the police to remove the leg irons and handcuffs and to leave at once. Mr. Bingham then asked his secretary to get my father a bath and a new suit of clothes and to return him in three hours. Mr. Bingham used his own personal money to buy my father clothing and a ticket on the S.S. Champlain to America.
I told Mr. Bingham’s children about this amazing act of Godliness that their father performed. Robert Kim Bingham and I developed a friendship and communicated about the ongoing movement to honor the exceptional deeds of his father. In January of this year he gave my name to Michael King the movie producer/director who was working on a new documentary Rescuers: Heroes of the Holocaust. Mr. King contacted me and asked if I would be interested in telling my father’s story. The rest is history. I just returned from Washington, D.C. after filming at the steps of the U.S. Senate, the Lincoln Memorial, and at the house of Abigail Bingham Endicott, Mr. Bingham’s daughter.
Thanks to you Nancy and NEXT GENERATIONS, I was able to complete my journey of my quest for the missing pieces of my father’s Holocaust story. I owe the completion of this final chapter of my father’s story to NEXT GENERATIONS.
I look forward to getting involved with NEXT GENERATIONS and Dr. Rose Gatens of F.A.U. Holocaust Education Program.
Very truly yours,
Lawrence Bodner
NEXT GENERATIONS Opening Meeting/Program; Nov. 5, 2009
STANDING UP TO EVIL
Closing Remarks
You might wonder why I was chosen to give the closing remarks at tonight’s program. My name is Connie Packman and I am not a child of a Holocaust Survivor. To my knowledge I lost no one in my family in the Holocaust. I was only 8 years old when the US entered into the 2nd world war and have very little recollection of the following 4 years and there was little in the history books during my educational years.
Yet I stand before you as a friend of NEXT GENERATIONS and as their treasurer and VP of fund raising. Why then was I chosen to close this educational evening. Why?
It’s called conscience.
13 Years ago right after the State of Florida mandated Holocaust education from k to 12, a group of women asked me to help organize an organization that would raise funds to train teachers to teach their students about the Holocaust. At that time I was living the life of fun and games that most live when they move to Florida and was not the least bit interested in getting involved in a charity organization. I felt I did that, done that and I liked my life the way it was. But again, what entered into it. Conscience!
My husband and I raised our grandson from the time he was 8 until he was ready to go to college. He went to Spanish River High and though we often helped him with his homework, we never questioned him about his curriculum..
When this group of women called me to help start their organization, I initially said no way, but again my conscience got in the way.
So I called my grandson who was at college at the time and asked him what he learned in high school about the Holocaust. His response was MOM-MOM- nothing. We learned about the 2nd world war, but nothing about the extermination of 6 million Jews. My first lesson about the Holocaust was in my 2nd semester at Penn State when I then realized the horrific of the war.
Once again, my conscience got to me. I believe that God puts us on earth with love and compassion, but the rest is up to us as individuals to help make this world a better place. It is then in our hands. So from that moment, 13 years ago I became obsessive compulsive to make sure that the lessons of the Holocaust will never be forgotten. And I have worked around the clock for all these years to make sure that these lessons will be heard.
But now it is 13 years later and so many of my survivor friends have left us. Think where we will be 13 years from now. So where do we go then?
Again, my conscience tells me there is only one place to go. To the children and grandchildren and heirs of Holocaust survivors to keep the message Alive. It is absolutely imperative to support the important role NEXT GENERATIONS must play in the years to come. For without them, who else? This is not an easy role for this generation. They were raised differently than most of us. Many became the mothers and their parents became the children. Many survivors could not share their painful stories with their children and only now, as adults are NEXT GENERATIONS sorting out the reasons.
In the horrifying world of the Holocaust, where evil took hold of governments and genocide became commonplace, as you witnessed in tonight’s film, courageous non- Jews risked their lives to save Jewish children and their families. These individuals knew they could pay the highest price of all--- but they knew they would pay an even bigger price, ignoring their conscience, so they did what they had to do.
Humanity from all corners of the universe continue to suffer horrific crimes motivated by ethnic, religious and racial bias. We teach our children the lessons of the Holocaust with the hope that the world will respond differently to these cries of help, but it seems that Never Again happens again and again and again.
So now in closing I want to ask all of you to listen to your conscience. You can support NEXT GENERATIONS by joining and becoming a friend of NG. Our dreams lie within our children and each of you can make a difference. Albert Einstein said “ The world is too dangerous to live in- not because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who sit and let it happen.”
I thank our friends of Temple Beth-El Sisterhood for partnering with NG tonight and especially want to thank my beautiful friend (inside and out) Asa Loof for telling her extraordinary story of the brave people of Scandinavia and to the Bick Family for being here tonight and allowing us to honor this extraordinary woman who I unfortunately knew only a short time but did know first hand the values she instilled in not only her family but in all others who knew her.
Thank you for sharing this evening,
Connie Packman, Treasurer
NEXT GENERATIONS
NEXT GENERATIONS TESTIMONAL
by Howard Herskowitz
I have so much to be thankful for to NEXT GENERATIONS. First, to Nancy Dershaw and then to all the wonderful NEXT GENERATIONS' members for their friendship, kindness, camaraderie and understanding. You have all been a wonderful support and positive influence for me in recent years, especially in connection with my own journey through “Aaron’s Journey – From Slave to Master.”
Unlike most survivors of the Holocaust my parents freely spoke about their experiences. While my mother, Helen Herskowitz, endured the tragedy of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and other death camps, my late father, Aaron Herskowitz, related an incredible tale that my siblings and I thrilled to as an epic adventure, that in its own unique way is far different than anything in Holocaust literature or history.
"So Dad, how many Nazis did you kill?" was the question I always asked my father as a young boy.
He often kept me spellbound with stories about his incredible struggles and fantastic escapes from the Nazis, so it was the most natural follow-up question for a boy to ask. Somehow, though, my father always avoided answering that one question. He would manage either to waltz out of the room or to skillfully change the subject.
But at last, after decades of talking with my father about the events of his youth, I videotaped, audiotaped and took extensive notes in a series of interviews with him. He was well known in the family and local community as a captivating storyteller, who could enhance his testimony even more so by impersonating the facial expressions and voices of other characters, including his incredible memory of the very conversations he had with these people. As he began to tell his story, it quickly became apparent that all the hours I’d spent listening to him as a boy had not prepared me for the full breadth of the horror, madness, and triumph he had endured.
One of the greatest impressions left upon me was Aaron’s resistance against the Nazis, especially when he had to kill his would-be Nazi assassins, sometimes with his bare hands; and then upon his escape, his ultimate revenge against his erstwhile tormentors for their crimes against humanity. To me and to my siblings, Aaron was a hero greater than any we had ever experienced in literature, history or on the silver screen. There are too few stories of Jewish resistance arising out of the Holocaust. Yes, there was the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the miraculous story of the Bielsky brothers, amongst very few others.
After I grew up and then became a lawyer, I maintained empathy for the innocent underdog, and experienced the same sympathetic passions in my study of history, where innocent outnumbered individuals or nations achieved victory against overwhelmingly superior odds. Drawing upon my historical and family roots as the son of two survivors, I have striven to become a champion of the underdog.
But as Aaron’s story continued to unfold, during my continual talks and interviews with him, and as my own research and study of the Holocaust grew, I did find myself plagued by another simple question that has fascinated many historians and observers about the plight of the Jews during the Nazi occupation: Why didn’t they fight back? And where was God? As Aaron’s tale unfolded, I began to understand the untold truth kept virtually secret until now, revealed in the book I’ve written: “Aaron’s Journey - From Slave to Master,” the site for which can now be quickly accessed on the web at aaronsjourney.com.
When I completed the book in its pre-final form, I gave a copy to Nancy Dershaw. I’ll never forget when she called me the next day and said “Howard, I couldn’t put it down. Before I started to read I thought it was going to be another Holocaust story, but it’s NOT. It’s the most incredible unique action packed story of survival and revenge, and it has affected me so emotionally, that I had to call you. I had to cancel appointments and meetings just so that I could finish it without interruption. Your father was one of the greatest heroes of the Jewish people ever. This story needs to be told to the world. And you have written it so beautifully.” I couldn’t thank Nancy enough for her kind support. I told Nancy that her reaction was similar to those I’ve been receiving from Jews and non-Jews alike, since the theme is universal. The background just happens to be the Holocaust. Other NEXT GENERATIONS' members have read the book and have given me similar encouragement. And now NEXT GENERATIONS has been kind and gracious enough to have me as a guest speaker about Aaron’s Journey on a panel about heroes of the Holocaust.
And indeed Aaron was heroic. After surviving years of terror after the Nazis and their Hungarian allies forced him into slave labor upon their invasion of Russia, Aaron escaped to the Russian side, for whom he became a hero, crossing back over enemy lines, arresting and capturing hundreds of Nazi officers and spies. When the tide of war turned, the Russians appointed Aaron as overlord of a captured enemy town. Thus, in an incredible reversal of fortune, Aaron became master of his former tormentors. The Russians gave him full authority to punish those enemies who committed crimes against humanity. It is this ordeal that tested Aaron’s own capacity for humanity itself.
As the late senator Tom Lantos quoted an ancient proverb upon reviewing a draft of Aaron’s Journey: “Don’t judge a man until you have walked two moons in his own shoes.”
Again, many thanks to Nancy, Rose, Zvi, Judi, Brenda, and all the other members of NEXT GENERATIONS for which I don’t have the space to name for their undying support. And NEXT GENERATIONS must always be recognized for the many invaluable programs, services, and education the organization brings to the entire community. I look forward to working with NEXT GENERATIONS for many years to come.
Kindest Personal Regards,
Howard Herskowitz
December 2009
Tucson, AZ
Dear Nancy,
Thank you again for nominating Syd Mandelbaum and Dr. Michael Hammer for the Cohon Foundation Award. They were honored this past Friday evening for their creation of the DNA Shoah Project and for service to Klal Yisroel, the total Jewish people.
Since our presentation to your organization almost two years ago, I have been impressed by the passion and generosity of your members. The field of Holocaust commemoration and education seems to attract dedicated individuals, but I was touched by the warmth with which we were received and the enthusiasm shown for our project. I know that we all left that day newly invigorated in the work that we are doing and feeling like we were an integral part of something much larger.
We are grateful for your support of the DNA Shoah Project and we are honored to count NEXT GENERATIONS among our partners and supporting agencies. Your commitment to education and your dedicated service to the Holocaust survivor community serve as a model to us all.
With my sincere appreciation,
Lynn Davis
Information Specialist
The DNA Shoah Project
Dear Nancy,
Like many other children in Israel, kids of Holocaust survivors, I ran away from the subject of the Holocaust. Through circumstances, responding to an article in the newspaper, I contacted Nancy concerning the organization NEXT GENERATIONS and was invited to a meeting. It has been revolutionary through this organization, going back in memories and understanding of what my parents endured, survived, and lived beyond to start a new life and family, managing to have grandchildren.
My memories flowed when I was interviewed by Dr.Rose Gatens for a DVD presentation. I was overwhelmed by the sadness and feelings the memories generated. I felt the loss of my parents and the miscommunication through a silent generation in which they chose to move on with their lives so that their children would have a better life not carrying the burden of what was done to them.
Through NEXT GENERATIONS, I was given the opportunity to speak with students in schools, temples, and churches in Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach Counties. It was a strange feeling, standing in front of students delivering the message and educating them of “Never Again” should anyone have to experience what was done to my parents and the Jewish populations of so many nations. While searching for the correct words after the students watched the DVD, I was thinking of the power of the Jewish nation through the generations of persecution and execution. How can this be prevented and avoided in the future? I related to the students, some of them recent immigrants from third-world countries, realizing that they looked up to me as a source of information from personal experience relating their experiences to mine of parents who suffered and the effect their suffering had on them and their children.
The only words I can think of are: “Be aware of the leaders you follow. Wrong leadership can cause another Holocaust.”
To Nancy Dershaw, and the organization of NEXT GENERATIONS, I wish to express my appreciation for giving me the opportunity and help for me to find the depth and meaning that I am the son of Holocaust survivors.
Warmest regards,
Zvi Feldman
zmagnifique@aol.com
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