Page 66 - Witness

Faigie Libman at Auschwitz-Birkenau
humanity to renew itself and to learn from past mistakes. Many of these same survivors have become eloquent spokesmen for the battle against, not just anti-Semitism, but also any kind of discrimination, racism, or intolerance.
Contemporary survivors often echo the same sentiment. When society pushes peo- ple to its fringes, when it mistreats the marginalized and the disenfranchised – be they immigrants or people with disabilities or a different skin color – they are among the first to raise their voices, saying, “We the survivors have been there, we above all people know what that feels like, and we know the terrible path down which these behaviors can lead us. Let us not repeat the same moral tragedy.”
The survivors who are with us today serve three significant roles, among others:
Storytellers: Survivors are repositories of the stories that reflect one of the most cataclysmic moral failures in the history of humanity.
Teachers: Survivors are often the voices of moral clarity, modern-day and eloquent prophets who teach us of our civic duties and our responsibilities toward our fellow human beings – and how we so often have failed them.
Models of Resilience: Survivors remind us that human beings have the capacity to rebuild their lives after having experienced the most devastating of losses imaginable.
In every country where they found themselves after the war, survivors made their mark. They are the ultimate example of the ability of love to overcome darkness, of faith to overcome adversity, of hope to overcome despair. Perhaps Holocaust survivor Faigie Libman, standing in Poland with a group of young people from Canada, the US, and Australia, summed up best what many survivors feel when she said, “When you have hatred in your heart, there is no room for love.”
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