GREENFIELD — A Holocaust survivor who lives in Amherst and regularly speaks to student groups visited Four Rivers Charter Public School on Monday to discuss her experience during the genocide of 6 million European Jews during World War II.
Henia “Henny” Lewin, 85, spoke to students in Joanna Morse’s 12th-grade world history class, which has started a multi-week unit to help students analyze the Holocaust’s underlying causes, international reaction, progression and aftermath.
Lewin started her presentation by explaining how authoritarian governments use division to sow hatred against certain groups of people.
“And it wasn’t by color — it was by religion. It was by heritage, OK? And so the people that they picked on were people who had a different culture, which was related also to a different religion, and that was the Jews,” she said. “Now, I’m wearing a pin, which is for people to ask me, ‘Why are you wearing this pin?’ And the pin is to tell people that antisemitism is also racism, OK?”
Monday’s speaking engagement was funded through a state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education grant that Four Rivers received for this school year.
“Hearing from the voices of those who experienced the history we study makes those historical choices feel more real. Most of the time, we rely on primary sources to help bring people’s stories into the classroom,” Morse said in a statement. “When we can bring in a person who can tell us about their own life and choices, the learning is so much richer for students. I have been lucky to have Henny come to my classroom a number of times over the years.
“I am so grateful for Henny’s willingness and strength to face these incredibly brutal experiences for the benefit of future generations and the choices these students will make in their lives,” she continued. “Students were so touched by hearing her speak and talking with her.”
Lewin told the students about her family history, including her maternal grandfather, who was a teacher of young boys, and her maternal grandmother, who ran a fabric and textiles store in the front of a one-room apartment they lived in. Lewin’s mother was a bookkeeper and her father was a traveling salesman. They met while working at the same company.
Lewin was born Henia Wisgardisky, the daughter of Jona and Gita (Salat) Wisgardisky, in Kovno, Lithuania, in January 1940. She was 1½ years old when the Nazis invaded Lithuania and she and her family were forced into the Kovno ghetto, used to forcibly contain Jews.
“What it was, was a death camp, a concentration camp,” Lewin said. “It might not have had the kind of developed gas chambers that Auschwitz did, but it was a death camp. It had barbed wire all around with people having to wear a [six-pointed star of David] on them to indicate they were Jews.
“They could only leave the ghetto if they had an important job to do for the Nazis. For instance, my father worked on an airport that the Nazis wanted to build outside the city,” she continued. “So he had a work permit to leave every single morning. And it was slave labor. He didn’t get paid for it — got some diluted soup, maybe a piece of bread for the day. So basically, they were trying to starve the people to death.”
Lewin explained that in a separate ghetto, parents were told by the Nazis to have their children outside early one morning to be transported for immunization. However, those children never returned. Lewin said many adults in the Kovno ghetto believed the Germans — who were generally regarded as educated and cultured people — would not kill children, but Lewin’s parents decided they needed to sneak her out of the ghetto.
Lewin lived as a Lithuanian Catholic couple’s “middle child” for two years and a Lithuanian priest who ran a nearby seminary helped Lewin’s cousin, Shoshana, escape to a farm.
Lewin told the students about a 21-year-old relative who was a member of a youth group plotting a revolt and was shot dead at the ghetto’s gate when a Nazi officer discovered he had baked a handgun into a loaf of bread. She told another story of the Nazis asking for 500 educated and multilingual Lithuanian men to volunteer for important work. She said 525 men volunteered, only to be taken to a fortress and shot.
Lewin reunited with her family after the war, which ended in August 1945. They went to Germany and then to Israel when she was 9. The region’s warm climate negatively affected her mother’s health, so the family moved to Montreal, where Lewin attended high school and college. She initially aspired to be a chemist but instead became a Hebrew teacher, “and it was really the right thing for me.”
She eventually earned a master’s degree from the University of Vermont.
Lewin returned to Lithuania in 1995, a few years after the country adopted its new constitution after gaining independence from the Soviet Union. She visited Holocaust museums and memorials and found old photographs, which she showed to Four Rivers students on Monday.
She told the students that not all Lithuanians were collaborators, but the others were bystanders.
“That’s who I’m the most angry with,” she said.
With tears in her eyes, Lewin said 1.5 million children were killed in the Holocaust, “so you can imagine how lucky I feel.”