At Chapman, Using ‘Living History’ to Study a Living Nightmare

Marilyn Harran is a strong believer in living history, hearing firsthand from someone who was there when it happened. Which is why she frequently invites death camp survivors to her Holocaust class at Chapman University in Orange.

“When something is passed on directly to your mind and heart, it can never be tampered with,” Harran says.

I was surprised to learn that a university would devote an entire class to the Holocaust. It’s often a subject in a class on a more general topic, like a look at World War II. But Harran, chairwoman of Chapman’s religion department, got enthusiastic support when she proposed the Holocaust class two years ago. Now it’s one of the most sought-after classes on campus. Her students are premed, religion, history, just about anything, with a variety of religious backgrounds.

Harran is not Jewish, and her own college research was on the Protestant Reformation. But her interest in the Holocaust, in which millions of Jews, Gypsies, the disabled and mentally retarded were eliminated in mass extermination by Hitler’s minions, was spurred early in her career. She studied in Germany for a while, and later, teaching college in New York, she met a death camp survivor. He showed her charcoal drawings made by his wife from her memories of her own years in a concentration camp.

“They were so dramatic, they really made an impression on me,” Harran says.

And probably reinforced her conviction that hearing directly from the source, when possible, is an important component of teaching history.

One of the most moving talks to her class, she says, came from Thomas Blatt, who lives near Seattle. He’s one of just nine living survivors of Sobibor, the Nazi extermination camp in Poland with five gas chambers. He was shot trying to escape, but survived because he was mistakenly left for dead in a field.

On Thursday, she brings to campus Leopold Page, who survived the Holocaust genocide after being included on Oskar Schindler’s now famous “list.” It was Page’s story that led to the book, which led to the Oscar-winning Steven Spielberg movie. Harran is opening this session to other students on campus, though limited seating prevents the university from making it a public event.

“History needs to be passed on from person to person,” Harran says. “We aren’t going to have these survivors with us forever. We need to hear them now.”

Women They Are: It’s been a pretty good week for Huntington Beach mystery writer Elizabeth George. First, People magazine said in reviewing her new book, “In the Presence of the Enemy”: “What sets her books apart--and shoots them beyond the genre--isn’t plot but character. . . . George serves up a splendid novel that readers will race to finish, yet not soon forget.”

Also, the play she’s underwritten at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, “If We Are Women,” opened Friday and runs through April 14. For Sunday night’s performance, SCR director Paula Tomei has invited 60 of the county’s most prominent women as her guests. The play is about a novelist facing turning points.

Around the Town: You still haven’t decided which 1st District supervisorial candidate is worthy of your vote? They’ll all be at the Santa Ana Merged Society of Neighbors session today at 1 p.m. It’s at the Coastal Communities Hospital, 2701 S. Bristol St. in Santa Ana. . . .

Today’s the grand opening for the Salvation Army’s new Red Shield Family Activity Center at 1515 W. North St. in Anaheim, across from Anaheim Plaza. It’s a new and improved version of what used to be a YMCA. . . .

Will you still need me when I’m 64? That’s the topic of the general session that opens today at the American Society on Aging at the Disneyland Hotel. It’s aimed at us baby boomers who still think more about the ‘60s instead of our ‘60s. . . .

Healthful Snacks: This is the month where your employer is putting the gentle squeeze on you to donate blood to the American Red Cross when its van comes to your company door. Here’s an added incentive that ought to pack ‘em in: Beginning Monday, local bloodmobiles will be stocked with one-ounce “prune snack packs” for each donor. The California Prune Board has donated a million and a half of these treats to the Red Cross. Pat Conlee, a Red Cross director, calls it “a natural” since “we rely on healthy donors to provide this blood. We want them to stay healthy and become regular donors.”

Note to those who just don’t like prunes: The snack packs aren’t mandatory.

Time for Bob: Robert K. Dornan, Garden Grove Republican congressman, continued his string of zero percentages in all seven presidential primaries this week. But lest you think Dornan isn’t getting national attention, here’s a line from Time magazine’s Calvin Trillin this week: “Pat Buchanan was permitted to call Bob Dole ‘Beltway Bob,’ but Dole was not allowed to call Buchanan an extremist. Bob Dornan was allowed to say anything he wanted to say, for the same reason your wacky Uncle Harry was allowed to say anything he wanted to say.” . . .

Speaking of right-wing reputations, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown this week lashed out at a radio station where a caller had used vicious racial slurs before station officials could move fast enough to bleep them out. Brown, by comparison, called it “right out of Orange County.”

Wrap-Up: From professor Harran’s Holocaust class introduction to her students: “Our goal is not only to understand the decisions that transformed people into perpetrators, victims or bystanders, but to understand how the choices we make each day shape our identities and our communities.” Not a bad thought for the rest of us either.

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or sending a fax to (714) 966-7711.