Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 28, 1993 TAG: 9304280507
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID A. VISE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
That wasn't what I had expected. Indeed, I had looked forward for weeks to hearing what President Clinton and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel had to say. I knew the president would find a meaningful way to connect the aging Holocaust survivors - who fear the death of all eyewitnesses - with our own post-World War II generation. "This museum is not for the dead alone," Clinton said, "nor even for the survivors. . . . It is, perhaps, most of all for those of us who were not there at all, to learn the lessons, to deepen our memories and our humanity and to transmit these lessons from generation to generation."
I knew that Wiesel would challenge the president, and the American people, to deal with current atrocities. "Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something," Wiesel said. "I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep since what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying that. We must do something to stop the bloodshed."
I wasn't prepared at all for Stephania Podgorska Burzminski from the Polish city of Przemysl.
Sandwiched on the program between the political leaders of the day and the Jewish leaders who had worked to build the museum, Burzminski, the ordinary citizen, had been allotted two minutes. That was all she needed.
In 1942 Burzminski, then 15, had been left with her 6-year-old sister, Helena, after their father died and their mother and brothers had been taken by the Germans to a labor camp. One evening, she recalled in deliberate, sincere English, there was a knock on her door.
"One evening came to me the son of the owner of a small grocery store where I had been working before the Germans came," she said. "He told me that he had jumped from the window of a running train which was taking him and his family to a concentration camp. He asked me for only one night of shelter."
He was a Jew, and Burzminski knew the risk. Others in the town had been hanged for helping Jews. "Our parents told us when we were little not to make differences between people," she said. "We all have one God. It doesn't matter how well-educated you are or how much money you have. They told us if you can help people, don't hesitate.
"When I saw the SS and Gestapo taking Jewish people into their ghetto behind the barbed wire, in my heart and in my mind, I felt that what they were doing was terrible, wrong and inhumane. It was then that I decided to help the victims of this terror."
Instead of just hiding one friend for one night, Burzminski ended up hiding 13 Jews in the attic of her family's apartment for 2 1/2 frightening years. The threat was not remote. During some of that time, the Nazis forced her to share her apartment with two German nurses. "Thank God, after 2 1/2 years of constant terror, we were finally liberated. All 13 survived. So did my sister and I."
Burzminski said that one of those she hid in the attic did not want to leave, and so he stayed. "Out of this experience, I gained my husband and the life I have led," she said.
Just then her husband, a smiling Josef Burzminski, stepped to the microphone and broke the tension. They had two grown children who were doing just fine, he said, and "the rest of the survivors are now grandparents, and everybody is OK." The audience smiled aloud.
President Clinton said the Holocaust reminds us forever that knowledge divorced from values can "only serve to deepen the human nightmare."
Elie Wiesel said as he stood before it last week that for him, the Holocaust Museum was not an answer, but a question mark.
For me, the question is clear and compelling as the Holocaust Museum opens to the public. How many of us will be Burzminskis, willing to put ourselves at risk to save lives and fight indifference?
"People keep asking me why I did it, hiding and saving these men, women and children," Stephania Podgorska Burzminski said. "What else could I do?"
David A. Vise is a Washington Post reporter and the son of Holocaust survivors.
LA Times-Washington Post News Service
by CNB