In the News: From pain and misery spring hope, compassion

Alter Weiner’s life as a Holocaust survivor is one of tragedy, horror and sorrow, but to hear him retell it is inspiring, uplifting and even life-changing.

About 500 Newberg High School students and staff were privileged to have that experience Friday morning, to simultaneously share his pain and his hope, to see both his frailty and his irrepressible spirit during a 75-minute presentation in the school auditorium.

“Afterwards kids came up to him in tears and told him he changed their life,” said teacher Kelly Schaeffer, who arranged the 87-year-old’s visit to the school. “Some kids were losing it. One girl was bawling and another boy waited patiently to be the last one and he started crying. It was amazing. I haven’t seen our kids show that much respect during a presentation and then have that reaction.”

The suffering inflicted upon Weiner as a teenager was staggering, from the murder of his father when the Germans first invaded his native Poland in September 1939, through his 1,050 days in five different concentration camps, which left him weighing just 80 pounds and able to grasp fully around his thigh with just one hand by the time he was liberated by the Russians in May 1945

When he returned to his home town after a few weeks of recuperating, Weiner found that just four of his cousins had survived, while 123 members of his extended family, including all of his immediate family, had not.

Weiner not only exposed the audience to a firsthand account of one of the darkest moments of humanity, providing a rare chance to experience living history, but he generated hope through his example of courage and planted a beacon for the future with the lessons he instilled.

“You never know, you never give up hope,” Weiner said. “I was doomed and here I am.”

While working in a factory that also housed German workers, Weiner’s outlook was forever changed by a middle-aged woman, “my hero until the last day of my life,” who risked her own life by sneaking him cheese sandwiches for 30 consecutive days.

“I learned there are good and bad people in every group,” Weiner said. “The practice of stereotyping is absurd. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. She taught me a very important lesson.”

The author of “From a Name to a Number,” Weiner has been telling his story to audiences across the Northwest, often changing lives by simply giving young people a broader perspective on their own problems, which diminish in magnitude and importance when compared to the terrifying ordeal that was his life as a teenager.

Friday was no different, with one student responding to Weiner’s query as to what the audience had learned by saying, “to never to give up, that even when it’s horrible, keep trying.”

Schaeffer was searching for a way to invigorate her freshman English class’ reading of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” a fictional Holocaust story by Irish author John Boyne, but after opening up the event to other classes, it affected almost of a third of the school. 

Weiner was as charming as he was motivational, getting several big laughs, including how he once attributed his own longevity to a lack of vices, aside from women and chocolate, of course.

But at the same time, he told the crowd that he still has regular flashbacks, that to be tortured like he was is to lead a tortured life.

“The Holocaust lives within me,” Weiner said. “I cannot part with it.”

“I feel an obligation to share my story, even though it’s not easy.”

By Seth Gordon, Newberg Graphic