Auschwitz Survivor, 83, Sees a Parallel in the Sudan Crisis

Dora Apsan Sorell, an 83-year-old survivor of Auschwitz, first learned of the crisis in Sudan from a television show, the same day her reparations check arrived here.

To her, the desperate people on the TV screen could just as well have been her own family and friends 60 years ago.

“I could just see in front of my eyes our people walking aimlessly, in dirty rags, hungry and bewildered, behind the barbed wires of the camps after being separated from their families,” said Sorell, a retired doctor. “Seeing those images left no doubt in my mind that this is another genocide that has to be addressed.”

In August, Sorell received $3,043 from the German government as compensation for her slave labor during the Holocaust. She donated it to a group helping refugees in Sudan, victims of what humanitarian groups describe as government-sponsored genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell recently told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Sudanese government and militias bear responsibility for the atrocities and that “genocide may still be occurring.”

In the Darfur region of western Sudan, government-backed Arab militias known as janjaweed are staging brutal raids to displace or eliminate the communities of tribal farmers.

Since 2003, more than a million civilians have been displaced. Most are now crowded into refugee camps and towns, where they continue to be murdered, raped and robbed by the militias, according to the nonpartisan organization Human Rights Watch. More than 100,000 have become refugees in neighboring Chad as well.

Sorell sent her reparations money to the American Jewish World Service, a nonprofit in New York that has raised $200,000 in emergency aid for the victims of Darfur.

In turn, the group channels most of the donations to the few humanitarian agencies that have access to refugees in Sudan and Chad, including Doctors Without Borders and the International Rescue Committee.

American Jewish World Service President Ruth Messinger recently returned from a week in Sudan, where she visited three refugee camps. She said she was moved by Sorell’s gift. “I literally burst into tears,” she said. “I thought it was the most extraordinary gesture.”

Born in the northern Transylvania town of Sighet, Sorell had just graduated from high school in 1940 when Adolf Hitler gave upper Romania to the Hungarians in exchange for the extermination of the region’s Jews.

She said she last saw her parents, Herman and Zissel Apsan, and her brothers, Moishi and Yancu, the night she arrived with her family at the Auschwitz extermination camp in May 1944. An SS guard’s blow to her arm broke Sorell’s grasp on her mother. In the days that followed, she cherished the pain because she knew it was all she had left, she said. More than 40 of her relatives perished there.

Sorell was at Birkenau, the concentration camp next to Auschwitz, until December 1944. She then managed to talk her way into a forced-labor camp in Germany, where she worked through the end of the war. That’s what the reparations are for.

Now, Sorell said, she wonders if the world’s indifference to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust is being repeated with the villagers of Darfur in part because they are black.

“I think Jews should be the most sensitive to this. If we don’t help, who will help?” Sorell asked. “It really hit me to see people so desperate.”

Sorell says the donation was small, especially in the context of what the Sudanese refugees are facing. “They need so much more than money. If I were young, maybe I would go there and work,” she said.

But Glen Galaich, the Northern California director of Human Rights Watch, says the symbolic nature of Sorell’s gift might raise awareness about a situation that has been met largely with international indifference.

“It will be a long-term effort to get the world to pay attention,” Galaich said. “It’s going to take a lot of symbolic, dedicated actions to really bring people around.”