Story by Adrianne Cleven
Images by Katie Clark
Video by Cambria Haro
When Abram Piasek, 12, arrived at Auschwitz in 1944, he caught what smelled like bacon cooking. He had endured a death march, was herded into a cattle car on a train, and suffered a case of gangrene in his left foot, so the scent was welcome.
He later saw some of his fellow inmates strip off their clothing and disappear into a large room. Piasek asked another Jewish prisoner what was happening.
“Well,” the prisoner said, “that is the gas chamber. On the other side, they take them and put them in barrels and then put them in the incinerator.”
It wasn’t bacon.
Piasek, now 91, survived his experience and later immigrated to the United States. He joins the remaining Holocaust survivors still living; in 2016, there were about 100,000.
Piasek worked as a baker in Connecticut before moving to North Carolina. Like some other Holocaust survivors, he shares his experience with middle school and high school students in coordination with the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust.
North Carolina’s “Education on the Holocaust and Genocide” bill, or H.B. 437, which the House passed unanimously in April, aims to bring standardized Holocaust education to all of the state’s public middle and high school students. Because of the sensitive nature of the subject matter, the bill only focuses on middle and high school students.
According to the bill, “The General Assembly finds that knowledge of the Holocaust is essential to provide students with the fundamental understanding of geography, history, and political systems necessary to make informed choices on issues that affect individuals, communities, states and nations.”
The bill was passed to the Senate in April and assigned to the Senate Committee on Rules, but no action has since been taken in the full Senate. Nine states already have bills similar to H.B. 437. N.C. Rep. Craig Horn, the Union County Republican who sponsored the bill, found that North Carolina has “no consistent policy” to teach about the subject.
As a Russian linguist in the U.S. Air Force, Horn visited Nazi death camps less than 20 years after WWII. Horn can close his eyes and remember the smells of Dachau, a former death camp in southern Germany.
“I can’t forget that,” he said. “I don’t want to forget it. And I want kids today to be able to internalize that – to the best of our ability to help them do it – so that they’ll be committed to never letting that happen again.”
Michael Abramson, volunteer chair of the N.C. Council on the Holocaust, says the bill is timely because Neo-Nazi groups and Hitler Youth groups are active in schools.
“There’s a group specifically called the 88 Club,” he said. “The eighth letter in the alphabet is H for Heil Hitler. And these groups are permeating schools, high schools, with massive social media, teaching hate. Attracting individuals who are disenfranchised, who are loners and who have no friends. That’s their target.”
Abramson’s primary concern is school violence, fueled by the presence of firearms and the influence of social media.
The Council on the Holocaust trains teachers on Holocaust education and purchases Holocaust-related books for classrooms.
Abramson said he even met a “white nationalist” student in a classroom. Once, when he was teaching about the Nazi’s violence toward people with disabilities, presumably to preserve Hitler’s “master race,” a boy in the back of the classroom said, ‘Well, that makes perfect sense to me.’
Abramson said he responded to the student with a respectful dialogue.
“I don’t let that slide at all,” he said. “What I said was, ‘It happened to be that even white Christian nationalists at the end saw what Hitler was doing, because he was killing his own people. He was turning children against their parents. He was making teenage girls have sex with men of all different types just to increase the race. So, take that too far, it went crazy. So even white nationalists turned against Hitler.’”
Steve Goldberg, a history teacher at Research Triangle High School in Research Triangle Park, met Piasek when he came to speak about the Holocaust at a school assembly. The two later led a school trip to Washington, D.C., and toured the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum with the students.
“The way in which you described your stories helped me to understand the evil nature of the Nazi’s under Hitler’s rule,” wrote Lexie Triblehorn, a senior who went on the trip, in a letter to Piasek. “The great description you were able to provide of the scarring events that took place so early in your life is miraculous. I am so grateful that you are willing to share your story and appreciate the courage it takes.”
Goldberg believes that it is important to teach about the Holocaust “from a position of Jewish empowerment,” instead of solely portraying Jewish people as victims.
He said that acknowledging historical complexity is vital, and takes time to teach in history classrooms. He plans to share Piasek’s story in his classroom as a way to humanize survivors and encourage student reflection on the “unchecked hatred” that fueled the Holocaust.
“I think the Holocaust is so horrifying that it grabs your attention,” he said. “And what are we going to do with that attention? We’re not just telling horror stories. We’re saying, ‘Hey, be careful,’ beause Germany was the most sophisticated, cultured place in Europe. And it happened pretty fast.”
Goldberg thinks that students can glean a message of inclusion and diversity from their studies of the Holocaust and other tragic events in history.
“When you ‘other,’” Goldberg said, “it becomes easier to hate. But if you get to know a Jew, a Muslim, a transgender person, a pick-your-group, then you’re just like, ‘Oh, I can’t hate all the members of this group because I went out to dinner with this person.’ So it’s anti-stereotyping. I think that’s what history is if it’s done well.”
A portion of the global population, including 5 percent of adults in the United Kingdom, deny the events of the Holocaust. Others suggest that the true impact of the genocide is less extreme than it has been described in history books. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, both the denial and distortion of Holocaust history are “forms of antisemitism.”
“It just devastates me to think that there are people out there that deny the Holocaust,” Horn says. “I just can’t – Oh my goodness. And, as a consequence, in my opinion, we do our students a terrible disservice. We do a disservice to our own future.”
Zev Harel, a Polish immigrant to the U.S. who now lives in Greensboro, was held at Auschwitz when he was 14 years old. He credits his survival to the help of several of whom he calls “righteous individuals.” One of those was an S.S. volunteer from Ukraine who told him to lie about his age when he first arrived at the camp. Harel told the guards that he was born in 1927 instead of 1930, his true birth year. As a result, he worked with the adults and avoided extermination.
“The life there was very simple,” he said. “You heard the sirens and you would get up. And at the end of the day, you would come back and nutrition was less than reasonable. I guess if you are lucky, you survived.”
Abramson says that survivors tend to be anxious and have less optimism. For instance, Piasek still has nightmares about the war. And above all, Abramson notices that survivors feel “an urgency to teach what they saw before it’s too late and they die.”
By the end of the war, Harel was 15 years old and being held captive at Ebensee concentration camp in Austria. After working in an underground tunnel and at a site for construction material development, he was sick with typhoid. Harel survived liberation because a U.S. soldier found him in a roadside ditch and brought him to a hospital.
Around the same time, members of the U.S. Air Force freed a 17-year-old Piasek from a train carrying him and fellow prisoners to Dachau. If the train had reached its destination, he is certain he would have been killed.
Piasek now cautions students against the possibility of another genocide like the Holocaust.
“It’s a possibility, a great possibility, that something like this could happen,” he said. “I’ve got to make sure it doesn’t happen. They should be vigilant. They should be on their toes and listen, and not get scared to go into politics. Clean politics.”
Harel and Piasek sprinkle their talks with expressions of gratitude. They are grateful for unexpected allies, WWII veterans, Red Cross workers and the opportunity to teach the next generation.
On a wall near the entrance of Harel’s home, there’s a small rounded sign that sums up his gratitude-centered worldview. It’s simple, with nothing more than a blue painted bird and two short words: “Lucky us.”
