Don’t bully.
And kiss those you love every day.
Those were among the concluding messages that child Holocaust survivor Endre Sarkany delivered to a rapt of audience of 60 fifth-graders at Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy.
Students like Frederik Lee and others in Christine Dahlin’s class have been exploring the Holocaust and genocide.
Allan Appel Photo
Sarkany and Clemente fifth- grader Frederik Lee.
Tuesday’s riveting talk marked the first time that Dahlen, a second-year teacher at Clemente, had invited into her classroom a speaker to bring the lived experience of a child in World War II home to her students.
“I’ve never seen such empathy from the kids,” Dahlin said explaining why she contacted the Holocaust Child Survivors of Connecticut, on whose speakers bureau Sarkany serves.
She said that the kids kept on asking: “Are there any alive?”
That was a teachable moment, Dahlen said. So she turned the question into a lesson: How do you research where to contact Holocaust survivors?
When the students located the Connecticut child survivors’ organization, a letter had to be written. That was another teachable moment, said Dahlin (pictured). So the next project was writing the letter inviting Sarkany.
Sarkany was born in Hungary in 1936. He lived as a young boy in hiding through the German deportations and the Soviet post-war occupation of his native Hungary. He escaped after the failed 1956 revolution and made his way to the U.S., where he attended college in Tennessee and became an IBM executive. He arrived in New Haven 13 years ago to work at the New Haven Jewish Federation.
On Tuesday, the kids had prepared more questions than Sarkany could answer after his gripping presentation of survival with about 150 other Jewish children in the dank basement of an old school. There he was cared for mainly by women, because all the men, including his father, had been deported to concentration or to work camps.
There were gangs of native Hungarian thugs — whom Sarkany compared to young recruits in ISIS today — working on behalf of the Nazis. They terrorized the women and kids within the ghetto in the winter of 1944.
At one round-up, Sarkany’s grandmother had what he described as the chutzpah to speak to an SS officer in her native and unusual Swabian dialect. She told him she and her family were mistakenly corralled.
“‘Anyone speaking in that [Germanic] dialect doesn’t belong here,” Sarkany paraphrased the response of the Nazi officer, who then sent Sarkany’s family home, saving them.
The kids were especially intrigued because Sarkany was just about fifth-grade age when the events he related occurred. Here are some of the their questions and his answers :
Did you understand Hitler’s reasoning?
Sarkany: No, we were very sheltered. We knew Jews were being persecuted … What’s really going on we didn’t know.
Was your grandmother your hero?
Sarkany: I think she was one of the saviors of our family.
What was the scariest thing about the Holocaust?
Sarkany: When someone shows up in your apartment and takes your father away. Your mother says he’s [just] going to work [and you know otherwise]. It’s a shocking thing. So then [also] there are these hoodlums who line [you and your family up against the wall] … Make sure you appreciate everything you have, be it little or great.
What was it like to hear the bombs go off?
Sarkany: Think of the Fourth of July and you hear the firecrackers. We knew the bombs were coming from the Soviet or Allied forces. It meant the war will be over. It was scary, the building might be hit, but also meant you soon might be free.
What was your first step like in America?
Sarkany: The excitement of the ship [approaching New York Harbor, in 1957, and the view of the Statue of Liberty]. Finally to get to the place I always wanted. My father, when he got out of the camp, said the American soldiers [who liberated him] were the greatest people in the world. “Now I’ll be free. I don’t have to worry about my religious beliefs. I can say what I want without fear the neighbors could report you.” I’ve been here 50 years. There’s no better country in the world.
The speaker said he was always the shortest in his class.
Did you ever go back to Budapest?
Sarkany: I did. And I met my wife on the trip. [To this day] If I go out in the morning and my wife is still sleeping, I kiss her and tell her I love her. It’s very important not to take anything for granted.
“Scarier”
As the kids took photographs with Sarkany and then lined up to return to their classrooms, Frederik said that, “It sounded scarier to hear it from him.”
As he was listening to the hour-and-15-minute presentation, he said, “I was thinking about what I’d do [had I been there] at that time. I’m not sure.”
His teacher was intrigued by Frederik’s comment. Dahlin said she might pursue that, in the next teachable moment, “after discourse with the kids.”