‘THIS WAS A HUMAN TRAGEDY, NOT JUST A JEWISH TRAGEDY’

Not only does Renee Firestone have the distinction of being among the first to give testimony for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, she also interviews other Holocaust survivors for the organization created by Steven Spielberg.

“I am also on the quality assurance team, so I watch most of the interviews that come through,” says Firestone, who appears in the foundation’s documentary “Survivors of the Holocaust,” airing Monday on TBS.

The foundation, she says, “is really a miracle. The project is not only about the survivors and their stories, but through their stories, the story of the six million who don’t have a voice also is told. That’s really the miracle of it.”

Firestone became acquainted with the foundation because she is a public speaker for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. “When the group first organized the first staff group, they invited me to talk to them about survivors,” she recalls.

The Holocaust, she says, is now taught in Southern California schools. “Most of the kids I speak to in school already know something, but of course when the survivor tells her story.... These testimonies are not only important for teaching purposes, which is the main reason why this project was born, but today we have groups out there who claim that the Holocaust never happened. That will be impossible after this. All of this will be worked into the computers.”

Firestone has interviewed “some people from Western Europe and some from Eastern Europe--two people who never saw each other and never heard of each other and at one point, they tell me exactly the same story. This is going to make it absolutely impossible to deny [the Holocaust].”

Firestone, who was born in Czechoslovakia, came to America in 1948. “I was very fortunate and then very unfortunate,” she says. “The region I lived in was given to Hungary when Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia. We thought we were saved. We thought since the Hungarians were allies to Germany and they permitted Hungary to implement their own anti-Jewish laws, we thought we will be in ghettos or maybe persecuted in some way, but for sure they will not make us leave the country. We will not be killed.”

But hope ran out in 1944. “When Hitler finally was being pushed back from the Soviet Union, Hungary was trying to separate itself from Germany,” Firestone explains. “Then Hitler occupied Hungary and it was a mass tragedy because about 400,000 Jews were destroyed within two or three months.” Most of the Jews, including Firestone, were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Firestone acknowledges that it is still almost impossible to fully absorb what actually happened. “Just to think that human beings could put together, what they call ‘the final solution.’ Put together a process so diabolical and so horrendous in numbers and execute it. It’s just absolutely incomprehensible.”

Children and parents, she relates, were separated immediately once they arrived at the camps. “It’s not like your mother is sick and you see her dying and you prepare yourself for it,” she says. “It is in one second. You got off the train, you were on that ramp. At one moment you are still surrounded by your mother and father and sister and then all of a sudden in one second you find yourself without parents.”

Firestone’s mother was killed immediately. Her father collapsed and was left for dead by the Nazis on a death march. “The Soviets as they were coming through found him and realized he was still breathing.” After the war, Firestone found him dying of TB. “He died a few months after that.” Her sister was selected for extermination six months after arriving at Auschwitz. “She was 14,” Firestone says. “She was four years younger.”

For years, Firestone says, “the world looked a the Holocaust as a Jewish problem. Not until they found out that non-Jews were murdered in these camps--Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals. That’s when they began to realize that this was a human tragedy, not just a Jewish tragedy. It’s true that the six million Jews were murdered only because they were born Jewish. Nevertheless, in this madness, violence and hatred, five million non-Jews were killed.”

Spielberg, Firestone says, “was the Pied Piper for the children with his movies, but with ‘Schindler’s List,’ he became an idol of the survivors. I don’t have to tell you that he’s the magic man. He’s the miracle man who made something happen that probably without him would never have happened.”