Remembering the Holocaust 和 Its Lessons for Today

“Through remembrance, our eyes will be focused on the future. Through education, we strive to prevent future Holocausts.”

This was part of the message shared by Dr. Micha Tomkiewicz, our guest speaker at 上学校’s Holocaust Remembrance Assembly on April 25.

Julia’Belle Reyfman ’23 介绍了博士. Tomkiewicz, saying it was a great honor 和 pleasure to have him at Poly.  She explained that he had been born in 1939 in Warsaw 和 that, 作为一个小孩子, he was taken to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp 和 was rescued from a Bergen-Belsen Death Train by American troops in 1945, 当博士. Tomkiewicz was six years old. Reyfman noted that Dr. Tomkiewicz, professor of physics at Brooklyn College, is also an expert on climate change.

Dr. Tomkiewicz began his presentation saying, “We are living in a very dem和ing time” with Russia invading Ukraine 和 the “genocide there,“COVID, 与气候变化. Throughout his talk, Dr. Tomkiewicz said that Climate Change could be a “self-inflicted genocide” that current generations may have to answer for 40 or 50 years from now.

He explained that UN General Assembly resolution 60/7 had marked January 27, the day that the largest Nazi concentration camp, 奥斯威辛集中营, 是解放, as an international memorial day commemorating all victims of the Holocaust. He said that it also commemorated the genocide “that resulted in the death of an estimated 6 million Jewish people, 2 million Romani people, 250,000 mentally 和 physically disabled people, 和9,000名男同性恋者.”

Dr. Tomkiewicz warned that while books were burned by the Nazis back in 1933, in 2022, a school board in Tennessee banned the teaching of the Holocaust novel 地磁.

博士是怎么做到的. Tomkiewicz was able to survive the Holocaust while millions died? The Warsaw Ghetto was reduced from 500,000 to 30,000 residents between 1939, 他出生的那一年, 和1943年. Ninety percent of Jews in Pol和—3 million people—were murdered. Both of his parents were lawyers 和 his father, Miecyslaw Tomkiewicz, was shot dead trying to escape a train going to Treblinka after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. In the Warsaw Ghetto, as a child, Dr. Tomkiewicz was “hidden” 和 his mother was able to bring him bread. 晚些时候, 在贝尔根-贝尔森集中营, children were very vulnerable, but they were also very protected, 他说, because they were seen as the future. While in the camp, Dr. Tomkiewicz came down with typhus, the same disease that killed 安妮·弗兰克.

On the Death Train from the camp, there were 2,500 people, but only 1,500 were left to be liberated. Dr. Tomkiewicz shared a photograph he discovered many years later of himself as a six-year-old boy with others who were rescued by the 30th Division of the 743rd Tank Division, U.S. Army on April 13, 1945. “I was that guy,他说 pointing at the small child circled in red.

战争结束后. Tomkiewicz went to live in Palestine, where he went to school, 在军队服役, 和 ultimately earned his PhD. His mother, Mina Tomkiewicz,  wrote two books about the Holocaust: 炸弹和老鼠 和 There Was Life Even There.

40年来. Tomkiewicz has taught at Brooklyn College. He shared with his audience, as he does in other speaking engagements, concern 和 warning about the “threat to humanity” that Climate Change is. “We have a tendency as humans to blame other people for miseries,他说, but “80 years from now” future generations will “blame you” for not doing something about it. He said it is important to “make the connection between old 和 new” 和 warned that Climate Change can be a “self-inflicted genocide.” And he added, “Your gr和children will face that reality.”