Ron Jacobsohn Learns about the Little Holocaust Survivors

As the world remembers the end of World War II, sixty-nine years ago, we came to the Ghetto Fighters Museum to learn about the little survivors of the Holocaust, the around 150-thousand children who survived and started a new life in Israel.

Ron Jacobsohn, JN1 Correspondent:
As the world remembers the end of World War Two, sixty-nine years ago, we came to the Ghetto Fighters Museum to learn about the little survivors of the Holocaust, the around 150-thousand children who survived and started a new life in Israel.

The manager of the children’s holocaust museum, Yad Layeled, Anat Carmel, has come up with new ways to teach the kids of today about the atrocities by reenacting, of the now deceased survivors testimonies, through actors live in-front of the visitors at the museum.

Anat Carmel, Manager, Yad Layeled Museum:
I’m very hopeful that that we can continue to keep the memory of the holocaust alive, to teach the holocaust. We have on our website many testimonies, which we have collected for over 18-years, we created little monologues and we have actors who come and reenactment the stories. They come here next to the written testimonials or near the plaques and perform the monologues and testimonies and suddenly it all comes to live for the spectators who come to see it and it’s very unique that you put theater in a museum, in an exhibition, in the workshop and that’s how we in cooperate the actors on the tour.

Telling the story to the future generations has become her life’s mission says Madene Shachar, who is one of the educators at the Museum.

Madene Shachar, Educator, The Ghetto Fighters Museum:
The idea that the gallery that we’re standing in right now is to present stories of Jewish children that survived the holocaust and the twist that you’re talking about is actually looking at the children the day after World War II ends, after the liberation everyone has this feeling that; OK now everything is going to go back to being ok and suddenly we realize many many children were orphaned, children that went into hiding that didn’t know where their families were, and many children didn’t even know their own identity. And so we try to deal with that subject through the prism of children’s homes that were created immediately after the war. From what we know, we’re talking about 150,000–200,000 children that survived after the war and found some sort of a home after. I think the biggest shock, and we hear this from many survivors that were young, is that they discovered that they didn’t have a family anymore and I think that during the holocaust, children will be children, and they had this hope that they would find their parents, they would find their families again and after the war, when they looked for their homes and their families they discovered that actually they’ve been left orphaned. So everything here actually documents, in an authentic way, what happened so it’s really hard for deniers to say well this didn’t happen when you have the actual facts, figures and photographs and documents.

The eternal optimist, Dorka Sternberg, who herself survived the Holocaust as a young teen; want to believe that the world will not the let memory of all the victims fade away.

Dorka Sternberg, 86-year-old Child Holocaust survivor:
I think that the memory of our story will continue, not the same as in a first-person form where you talk about yourself, but I think that our stories will continue to be told, perhaps in a different way and all this in order to be able to warn, in order for us to build a society made up of good people.

Ron Jacobsohn, JN1 Correspondent:
And as the survivors pass away it is crucial that exhibits like this will continue to teach the new generations about the atrocities of Nazi’s so that something as vicious as the Holocaust will never happen again.
For JN1 I am Ron Jacobsohn at Kibbutz Lochami Hagetaot in Northern Israel.

About Ron Jacobsohn

World renowned, award winning, correspondent, Ron Jacobsohn, brings from his very entertaining world to Ron's World.

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