Less than a month ago marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Tenth graders at SV High School had an opportunity to experience the history of the Holocaust through the eyes of a living relative of a survivor through a virtual meetup on February 24, 2025.
Don Schapira, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, talked about his family’s history and experiences with the students. This is the second year of a pilot program begun last year with the Jewish Federation of Greater Binghamton. Mr. Shapira's virtual visit was made possible by 3GNY, a nonprofit organization that shares the stories and experiences of living third-generation family members of Holocaust survivors.
Mr. Schapira not only shared remembrances of his grandfather's experiences but talked about his personal memory of being taken to a trial of a former concentration-camp guard as a child by his grandfather after he, his brothers, and some cousins asked the Holocaust survivor about what had happened to him. His grandfather, Mordechai Gabrieli* took his grandchildren to the trial of "Ivan the Terrible" (John Demjanjuk) in Israel. There they heard testimony from Holocaust survivors about the atrocities they suffered. Afterward, his grandfather told them his personal story, which he had never talked about before that time. Marshal Ion Antonescu, with the infamous Iron Guard, assumed control of the fledgling Romanian democracy. Jewish citizens were persecuted, killed in pogroms, and sent to forced labor camps or detention camps. He said that his grandfather, as the most able-bodied member of his family, ended up in a forced labor camp from 1942 - 1944. Though appearing able to escape, he feared that the rest of his family would be murdered should he not obey the orders of the camp guards.
Among other topics Mr. Schapira discussed in his almost hour-long presentation was the film "Schindler's List," which he said he first saw when he was about the students' age now, the anti-Semitism he experienced in his adopted country of Canada when he was growing up, the betrayals that Jewish citizens experienced during World War II - often being turned in by their own neighbors, the Nuremberg Race Laws, including the Reich Citizenship Law, that discriminated against people of Jewish ancestry, and how Auschwitz was not a single camp, but actually a complex of 40 concentration and extermination camps. He also shared the sobering statistics that accompany that period of history - between 1941 and 1945, 1.1 million people were killed in Auschwitz alone, and one million of them were Jewish. In Eastern Romania, his grandfather's birth country, approximately 300,000 Jewish citizens were killed, often in pogroms, where neighbor turned on neighbor.
Students could ask questions throughout the presentation. Some of the students' questions follow:
1. Did your grandfather ever have part of his story that he never spoke about?
Answer: "Yes, there were five months he was a prisoner in Romania that he did not talk about where he was during that time."
2. Did you ever notice any quirks, any PTSD, in your grandfather?
Answer: "He had to be heard; he couldn't let something go."
3. What is your favorite memory of your grandfather?
Answer: "He would listen; even though we were children, he would listen to us. I felt very taken care of by him."
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or more information on 3GNY and its mission, please visit its website, www.3gny.org
*His grandfather's birth name was Martin Bercu; he changed it to Mordechai Gabrieli when he moved to Israel.