Helen Shabas, a Holocaust survivor, shared insights and reflections on her life as a Jew in Poland under the Nazi occupation Tuesday evening. The event was held at the Winnick Chapel of the Brown/RISD Hillel, and the room was completely full, with some audience members standing in the back. The event began with a short documentary, which depicted the experiences of Shabas and her family during and after World War II. The film was directed by Shabas' grandson, Harrison Heller '11, and another grandson, Benjamin Heller '13, introduced her.
Following the documentary, Shabas recalled her memories in a conversation with Adam Teller, associate professor of Judaic studies.
Shabas, who was 11 years old when the war began in 1939, said before the war Jews were treated badly in her small Polish town, but that "life under the Nazis was torturous."
Under the Nazi regime, Shabas and her family were forced out of their home and into a Jewish ghetto, where they shared one room and a kitchen with 10 others. In the ghetto, they had no electricity and often went without food.
Along with her mother, sister and cousin, Shabas fled the night before the ghetto was liquidated, and the remaining Jews, including her father, were sent to a concentration camp where her father was later "shot to death," Shabas said.
For the next five years, Shabas lived alone in the woods of her town, barely scraping by. "How could you describe the fear?" Shabas said. "You can't explain to people the hunger."
Shabas said even now, she sees places and thinks, "that would be an excellent place to hide from the Germans."
Eventually, Shabas joined a Jewish partisan group that fought to protect Jews in her town. When the war ended in 1945, she and her remaining family members lived in a displaced persons camp in Rome until they immigrated to the United States.
"I will never forgive until the day I die. I can't," Shabas said. "I didn't have a youth."
The event concluded with a question and answer session. Audience members asked how the war impacted Shabas' faith in God and her outlook on the world.
"I was always proud to be a Jew, even in my worst times," Shabas said.
The talk "made me realize how important it is to hear from the survivors themselves," said Ivy Sokol '15.
"We get a sanitized version of history by people who don't understand it," Teller said. But Shabas, Teller said, understands it.
Shabas said the generation that lived through the Holocaust would not be around to tell their own stories for much longer. "Remember that I was here," she said, "and be watchful that nothing like this ever happens again. Never again."
