Page 48 - Witness: Passing the Torch of Holocaust Memory to New Generations

RESISTANCE THROUGH
KRYSTYNA WITUSKA (1920–1944) A Young Polish Heroine
I am First a Human Being
Krystyna Wituska was born near Lodz, Poland, in 1920. After the Nazis evicted her family from their home she came to Warsaw with her mother and saw firsthand the brutal treatment of its Jewish population. She later fell in love with Karol Szapira, a Jewish boy hiding in Warsaw. In 1941 she joined the Polish underground but was arrested in 1942 and sent to the Alt-Moabit Prison in Berlin. She continued to write from prison to her family and to Karol, who was shot by the Nazis in 1943, a fact her family kept from her. Krystyna Wituska was beheaded on June 26, 1944 in Halle-Saale, near Leipzig. Today, a monument in her memory stands in Halle-Saale, initiated by Irmgard Sinner, the daughter of Werner Lueben, the officer who sentenced Wituska to death.
“On the day that I die I want to die for freedom and justice and for all humanity and not just for my Poland. I am first a human being and then a Pole.... Consciousness
of a universal humanity will comfort me. But please
don’t misunderstand. It is not that I don’t love my country, but I would relinquish my country’s objectives, if they were not also good for all of humanity.”
“If you have a good understanding of life, you know how to accept death. The important thing is to maintain one’s human dignity to the end.”
ANNE FRANK (1929–1945)
I Still Believe that People are Good at Heart
Anne Frank, perhaps the most well-known victim of the Holocaust, was a talented and sensitive writer. She and her family were hidden by their Dutch friends, until they were betrayed and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her entire family, with the exception of her father, perished in the Holocaust. Anne died in Bergen-Belsen in March of 1945, just a few months before the war’s end, at the young age of 15. Her diary, later called The Diary of a Young Girl, was published after the war and has sold millions of copies and been translated into many languages.
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
“It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
“No one has ever become poor by giving.”
“I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that this cruelty too shall end, and that peace and tranquility will return once again.”
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