“Get it all on record now. Get the films. Get the witnesses. Because somewhere down the road of history, some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.” — Gen. and future U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower after the liberation of a Nazi death camp in 1945
Keanu Reeves was 29 in 1995, a few years older than the target audience of the “CBS Schoolbreak” special, “Children Remember the Holocaust.” At the time, the Canadian-born actor was best known for “excellent adventures” and “bogus journeys” with his teenage best friend, “Bill.”
“Ted” seems an odd choice to narrate a documentary about the Holocaust, but Reeves serves admirably as a relatable shepherd of personal stories culled from the diaries, letters and published recollections of children who lived its horrors firsthand.
“The house is cold,” a young girl’s voice reads over photos of a Jewish ghetto. “We have no wood. We are hungry all the time. I see them (beggars) every time I go out. They no longer beg for bread, but for death. I’ve learned to appreciate the ordinary things.”
“My little brother died yesterday,” another child of the Nazi-imposed ghetto shares. “He is dead and there is nothing I can do about it. If I’d reported his death, they’d have taken away his (ration) coupons. … This way I get an extra month of bread.”
“The image of my father always laughing, joking, singing songs, seems to be fading away like a flickering candle,” a frightened daughter laments. “He sits and cries all the time. I don’t want him to cry. Everybody else can cry, but not him.”
High school students from Northeast Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey were transfixed by the film screened in a ballroom of the Hilton Scranton and Conference Center on Tuesday. About 800 students attended the first day of the 37th annual Teen Symposium on the Holocaust, presented by the Holocaust Education Resource Center of the Jewish Federation of Northeastern Pennsylvania. The event continues Wednesday with a comparable complement of students.
“I have seen that film several times, and it never gets any easier to watch,” Master of Ceremonies Susie Blum Connors told students and teachers. “It is important to remember that of the 6 million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust, one and a half million were young people just like yourselves.
“To make that number seem real to you, it would be the equivalent of one school building and all its students disappearing each and every day for eight years.”
Judging by facial expressions and stunned looks exchanged by students, that staggering math sunk in. These young Americans were paying attention. They were there to learn.
“It is our fight to preserve memory and to awaken the conscience of all of you in attendance today and that you will integrate the lessons learned into your actions and reactions,” Susie said. “The daily horrors of the Holocaust dare not be forgotten. This program also strives to make the mandate, ‘Never Again.’”
Acting on that mandate rests mostly on the shoulders of young Americans, said late former Army Staff Sgt. Alan Moskin. The American-born Jew and death camp liberator who served under the legendary Gen. George S. Patton died in 2023, but a video of a speech he delivered at the 2018 symposium seemed all the more timely and powerful considering the current parallels between Our Republic and the Weimar Republic that fell to fascist rule.
If you don’t see the glaring similarities between Hitler’s hijacking of Germany and Trump’s ongoing assault on America’s founding principles, institutions and ideals, you are choosing to look the other way, just like the German “bystanders” of the ’30s and ’40s. MAGA Republicans in the House recently voted down a measure that would block the detainment and deportation of U.S. citizens without due process, opening the door for Trump to arrest and remove anyone he deems an “enemy of the state.”
“First, they came for the Jews … ”
Moskin, who was 96 when he died, didn’t mince words. His unvarnished use of ethnic and racial epithets that promote hate and his graphic descriptions of combat and conditions in the death camps were jarring, and meant to be. He was an American who saw hell up close and vowed never to let the world forget or allow Holocaust deniers to erase its horrors from history.
Moskin devoted his life — as a young soldier and a retired lawyer turned public speaker — to keeping industrialized genocide of any kind from happening ever again.
Thursday marks the 80th anniversary of “V-E Day,” the day Germany issued its unconditional surrender to the Allies. About 66,000 American veterans of World War II are still alive, but all are in their 90s or older. By 2034, projections predict about 1,000 will remain. About 220,000 Holocaust survivors are still alive, but their average age is 87. About 70% of them are expected to be gone in 10 years.
“And when we’re gone, the deniers are going to come out of the woodwork,” Moskin said in 2018 and again via video Tuesday. “They’re out there already. They’re going to come out and say, ‘The Jews made it up. It didn’t happen.’”
The Holocaust did happen. That such a thing need be said is a shame that’s sure to grow as more of those who experienced modern humanity’s most indelible expression of evil and those who ended it pass into history.
Moskin ended his speech with a request that sounded like an order. When the Holocaust is downplayed or denied, he called on young Americans to stand up for the truth.
“Stand up and speak out,” he said. “Don’t be bystanders. I’m an upstander. I need you to be upstanders, too.“
CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, was raised to be an upstander. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook.