On the 8th of April, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Slater Torah Academy received an amazing opportunity to hear from two of the only living holocaust survivors who live in New Orleans -- Anne and Lila Skorecki. The sisters were born in Lodz, Poland on the eve of WWII and they shared with us their stories and experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The two heroic women joined us on the Kaufmann Patio and spoke for an hour about their lives during and after the holocaust. Lila began their narrative with an image that was seared into her memory as only a toddler: Nazi soldiers collecting prayer shawls and prayer books from their synagogue into a pile, and continuing to douse the pile in kerosene. With her older sister, Anne, she suffered two years in a Warsaw Ghetto, spending entire days in a vegetable bin. The students asked if they were allowed to do anything while in the bin to which the reply was, “We just sat there the whole day. We didn’t have food, we didn’t have books, we couldn’t talk. We were trained to be very quiet,” recalls Lila, now 82.
This had to be their routine because when their parents left to work at their shoe factory, the children were extremely vulnerable. Jewish children’s vulnerability was common across Europe as over one and a half million were killed by the Nazis. The sisters’ message to the students is to learn a lesson from the Holocaust, and to never, ever forget this stain in history. “Sometimes it’s not what you do that you get punished for, but who you are.”
The students continued to ask a myriad of questions and the two sisters graciously answered them one by one.