VAN NUYS : Tragedy of Holocaust Recalled at Valley College

Images of death are numbing, but words rarely describe the emotions wrought when eyes witness the indifferent killing that was Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz--sites where millions of the world’s Jews were slaughtered half a century ago.

In a daylong Holocaust remembrance program at Valley College in Van Nuys on Wednesday, pictures from the Nazi death camps drew sighs and shrugs of disgust from students who watched films and listened to speeches, transfixed by accounts of genocide.

“The images are so hard to take in, no matter how prepped we think we are,” said Rabbi David Gedzelman before a group of 100 students at the college. “We can’t help but shake our heads in disbelief and horror and feel wounded anew.”

Indeed, even observers share some of the wounds inflicted in the concentration camps. And many agree that the world still harbors the attitudes that triggered that sweeping kind of racism.

“A lot of people look at America and say that it can’t happen here,” said Barak Raviv, 19, a sophomore. “It happened in this world only 50 years ago and it can happen again.”

Experts on the Holocaust insist that the horrible images from the camps must be continually shown for it never to occur again. With time, people forget, but this is one chapter of history, they say, that must not be forgotten.

“Is the world a hundred years from now going to understand this lesson?” asked professor Zev Garber. Soon the survivors will have died and there will be few who can tell the stories firsthand, he told the audience.

Rena Drexler, who spent four years at Auschwitz, is one of those few. She cried as she spoke, recounting the despair she felt upon arriving at Auschwitz. Like thousands of other families, hers had been packed into a cattle train and shipped there.

“Well, you didn’t see a future in Auschwitz, to be a survivor,” Drexler said. “They took away my whole family and I never saw them again.”

It was that type of treatment that created a society of prisoners who got “used to standing,” as Petr Fischl, wrote in a poem when he was 14, just before he died in Auschwitz. The poem was read by Jessie Dominguez, Associated Student Union vice president.

“We got used to being kicked, slapped, undeserved,” he wrote. “We got used to seeing people die in their own excrement.”

The remembrance day, which was organized by a coalition of student groups also included a showing of the Academy Award-winning film “Schindler’s List.”