Holocaust Remembrance Week honors victims
Aline Kultgen will share her experiences living through the Holocaust.
Published April 13, 2010
The Jewish Student Organization will honor people killed in the Holocaust by organizing lectures and other remembrance activities this week.
Holocaust Remembrance Week events include the reading of victims' names in Speakers Circle, a movie screening, a lecture by a local Holocaust survivor and a speech by a Westminster College history professor.
During the Holocaust, Nazis killed 11 million people because of their race, religion or sexuality, including 6 million Jews, JSO Social Action Coordinator Emily Shyken said.
She said Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, was Sunday.
"We just want to give awareness to more people on campus, because a lot of people know about it, but they've never met a Holocaust survivor, or they just know what their textbooks tell them," Shyken said. "So we're just trying to give them a real experience to put a face with it."
Westminster College History Department Chairman Sam Goodfellow will speak Tuesday about the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals.
Goodfellow said the Nuremberg Trials set a precedent for handling legal justice internationally. He said the Nuremberg Trials raised many complex, difficult questions about the restoration of justice.
"Who's responsible and how do you go about identifying who's responsible?" Goodfellow said. "How do you get a society to change its views about what's happened in the war and their complicity? Or can you make those changes?"
Students can watch "The Reader" on Wednesday. Shyken said JSO chose "The Reader" because it is a new Holocaust-related film many people have not seen.
JSO members will read the names of Jews killed during the Holocaust on Thursday in Speakers Circle and hand out yellow Star of David stickers. During the Holocaust, Jews had to wear yellow Stars of David to identify themselves.
"When we read the names, we also have their ages, place of birth and what concentration camp they were at," Shyken said. "It's surprising how many young kids there were. There were also a lot of people our age who died too."
After the reading of names, Columbia resident Aline Kultgen will share the history of the Holocaust in France and her experiences living through the Holocaust.
Kultgen said she lived with her aunt and uncle in France during the Holocaust. The Nazis killed her father, who was part of a resistance group, just before the end of the war, when she was 6 years old.
As an adult, Kultgen started to research the Holocaust in France, which led her to learn more about her father's experiences.
"It's the kind of thing that has always both drawn me and repelled me," Kultgen said. "You want to know, you're curious, you're proud, but at the same time it's painful. He died a horrible death."
Kultgen said she will speak about her experiences, her father's story, the arrest of children in the Izieu children's home, the Le Chambon village that gave shelter to Jews and the 1942 roundup of Jews in Paris to be sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
"What I do know is that a lot of children my age were sent to Auschwitz or separated from their parents," Kultgen said. "Their lives were incredibly disrupted and there was a lot of pain. I was really very fortunate."
Hillel Executive Director Kerry Hollander said former student Shai Ronen started leading Holocaust remembrance activities about 15 years ago, which marked a change in the leadership of JSO events.
"That was a change in the nature of the Hillel environment," Hollander said. "We've gone from non-students doing programming for students to students doing programming for students. It enabled students to express themselves fully with all of the many strengths our students have."