Painful history to be remembered

Program at MSU to continue recollection of Holocaust horror

By Mannix Porterfield

Max Lewin and his ever-present smile once were a fixture on the streets of Beckley.

Always upbeat and friendly to any stranger he encountered, the longtime businessman belied the pain of losing most of his family when the Nazis stormed into his native Poland in the summer of 1939.

Like millions of others, he was caught up in the nightmare known as the Third Reich, a time of carnage that ended with the death of 6 million Jews in Europe, one-sixth of them children.

Lewin wanted to make sure succeeding generations never forgot one of history’s ghastlier eras.

Working with Mountain State University, he and the school’s executive vice president, Jim Silosky, planned the installation of the Bell Tower that commemorates to this day the Lewin family victims in Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution,” a plan to erase Jews in a series of death camps in German-occupied Europe.

“Max and I worked very closely here at the university on his Bell Tower,” Silosky recalled.

“He was the one who brought the information to me about the Holocaust material. He had received some things from folks in Washington, D.C. He thought it would be a most appropriate thing to do here on the campus of the university.”

Thus was born the Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Day of Remembrance, set to be observed at 1 p.m. Sunday at MSU’s Carter Hall.

MSU became a major player in the program and continues to promote the observance.

Philosopher George Santayana, in the first volume of “The Life of Reason,” warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Often misquoted, the line has become a watchword of groups and individuals seeking reforms along a variety of fronts to guarantee that the rights of all are upheld and an evil episode from the past doesn’t rear its ugly head again.

In this case, the Holocaust certainly is an appropriate application of Santayana’s famous remark, Silosky feels.

“I think that the remembrance of historical events that people try to change over time for their own convenience, for whatever that reason may be, makes this particular World War II atrocity a critical piece of human history to pass on to our children so they can recognize what can happen, what can take place,” he said.

Accenting the need for such observances as this weekend’s ceremony by Temple Beth El in Beckley is the shrinking Greatest Generation.

“There are very few people that are remaining from that generation, from that age,” Silosky mused.

“That personal account, that personal experience, whether it was people like Max or whether it’s our World War II vets we’re losing so quickly ... At some point in time, we’re going to find ourselves with nobody connected to that period of time. How else do you keep educating, keep reminding the next generation of what mankind was able to do to itself during some horrific periods of our history?”

Six decades have passed since the Third Reich crumbled in the ashes of an overrun Berlin, and mankind either didn’t understand the lessons of that grim time or chose to ignore them. New mass killers have come and gone, and even now, in Iran, new threats are thundering from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to erase Israel from maps of the Middle East. Such threats assume even more gravity with the prospects of nuclear fire power.

“It’s always the terrible things that get repeated,” Silosky said of Santayana’s timeless observation. “Unfortunately, they do not repeat the good parts of time.

“God knows there have been extermination attempts around the globe by many different despots. I think this gives the community and even, in a broader sense, across the United States when you see services like this (Sunday’s) going on. It keeps it in front of them. Can you imagine what it will be like with people not knowing about it? It’s so horrific that if you didn’t do this, people wouldn’t believe it actually occurred.”

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower sought to make sure there was no excuse for not remembering the grisly work of the Nazis, inviting photographers and anyone else with an eye toward history to take pictures at the liberated camps and record the horrors for posterity.

“I think Eisenhower’s concern was that eventually, as generations passed, no one would believe that this actually occurred,” Silosky said.

“It was so horrible. It’s a constant battle of vigilance of making sure that everybody understands that these things can happen, they have happened. As you say, they’ve been repeated ... this whole ethnic cleansing, whether it’s in Africa or whether it’s in the barrios of Poland and wherever it may be, the rice fields of Southeast Asia with Pol Pot. Look what Joseph Stalin did to his people in Russia. It’s terrible what people will do to one another.”

Under the guidance of Tom Sopher, president of Temple Beth El, Sunday’s program will feature Margot Maynard, a former student rabbi at the Beckley congregation and now religious leader at Temple Beth Israel in Sharon, Pa., and Dr. Barry Levin of Beckley, who will recall his childhood memories of learning from Holocaust survivors in Cleveland.

A highlight of each ceremony since Lewin’s death in 2002 has been a dedication performed by Margaux Siegel, fulfilling her promise to the late businessman to keep his memory alive.

“I was impressed by Max’s compassion,” Silosky said.

“You take a person like Max who has been through all that he has been through. He could have become so jaded in his attitude, but he did absolutely the opposite. He became compassionate. He became caring. He reached out to people, which was very difficult for Max because there was also an element of Max of suspicion, an element of fear. It was his compassion, his caring, for the people here in Beckley, for the people at the synagogue, for the people here at the university, for his family members that he had lost decades ago.”

Lewin made a habit of taking in historical programs on television, his eyes riveted on footage of Holocaust survivors with the hope burning he might recognize a relative.

“He was hoping against hope that someone was still there, that he could still find someone in his family,” Silosky said.

— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com