Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part one War is a Terrible Thing!
- Part Two Guarding One’s Humanity During War: World War II
- 2 If Something’s Going to Get You, It’ll Get You
- 3 Prejudice, Bigotry, and Hatred. Love and Luck
- 4 Everything Went Downhill after that
- 5 In the Middle of a Hailstorm, One doesn’t Fear for One’s Own Life
- 6 Belonging to Something
- 7 Hard to Adjust After all that
- Part Three Other Voices, Other Wars: From Indochina to Iraq
- Part Four Civil Wars and Genocides, Dictators and Domestic Oppressors
- Part Five My Story, Your Choice How to Use it
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgments by the Senior Author
- Index
3 - Prejudice, Bigotry, and Hatred. Love and Luck
Laura, Holocaust Survivor on Schindler's List
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2014
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part one War is a Terrible Thing!
- Part Two Guarding One’s Humanity During War: World War II
- 2 If Something’s Going to Get You, It’ll Get You
- 3 Prejudice, Bigotry, and Hatred. Love and Luck
- 4 Everything Went Downhill after that
- 5 In the Middle of a Hailstorm, One doesn’t Fear for One’s Own Life
- 6 Belonging to Something
- 7 Hard to Adjust After all that
- Part Three Other Voices, Other Wars: From Indochina to Iraq
- Part Four Civil Wars and Genocides, Dictators and Domestic Oppressors
- Part Five My Story, Your Choice How to Use it
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgments by the Senior Author
- Index
Summary
By surviving the Holocaust I was given the gift of life a second time; that's how I look at it. I was incarcerated from May eighth, 1942, till May eighth, 1945, which happened to be my mother's birthday. At that point I didn't know she had been killed. I was still searching for her. And why were they killed: my mother, my father, my brothers? All in all sixty-three members of my family were killed. Why? Because of prejudice and bigotry, and hatred. So how do I live with that? How do I forgive them? What do I do? I always wanted to be the best person I could so that no finger could be pointed at me and say, “She's a Jew. She's not righteous.” I always wanted to do the best I could because of what happened to me, to prove I was worthy of having stayed alive.
Many times when I speak at schools, students ask me, “How come you stayed alive when your family and the six million did not?” I could never give an answer to that. I didn't know myself. Only by sitting down and writing my book did I learn how I survived. It was a set of circumstances. It was luck. It was where I stood at a given time, and of course what time of year it was. In my little prison dress, it was no stockings, just wooden shoes. Standing at the place where they counted us it was freezing cold or else it was so hot. It took me nearly twenty years to write this story and finally I figured out by writing. I could never find the voice I wanted to give it. I started writing in the third person. But when one does that, then we move one's self from what really one wants to convey. So I started all over again in the first person. That gave it the right voice – the voice of my voice when I was your age or younger. I’m now eighty-six years old and I was sixteen when it happened.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Darkling PlainStories of Conflict and Humanity during War, pp. 55 - 75Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014