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Holocaust Survivor Reading and Qs

David Gewirtzman is a Holocaust survivor and Jacqueline Murekatete survived the Rwandan genocide, they work together to educate students on preventing hatred and genocide. Gewirtzman hid from Nazis in a Polish pigsty for 20 months while Murekatete's entire family was killed in the Rwandan genocide but she was saved by her grandmother.

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65 views3 pages

Holocaust Survivor Reading and Qs

David Gewirtzman is a Holocaust survivor and Jacqueline Murekatete survived the Rwandan genocide, they work together to educate students on preventing hatred and genocide. Gewirtzman hid from Nazis in a Polish pigsty for 20 months while Murekatete's entire family was killed in the Rwandan genocide but she was saved by her grandmother.

Uploaded by

brylow3666
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Holocaust & Rwandan Genocide Survivors

Work Together to educate against Hate


David Gewirtzman and Jacqueline Murekatete
stood before a restless group of students at Great
Neck North High School , waiting to tell their
stories. They seemed to be an unlikely pair
speaking on what seemed an unlikely topic -
genocide - for a group of teenagers munching on
sandwiches and rustling snack wrappers.

By the time they had finished, however, the only


sound that could be heard in the room was the
faint hum of a radiator.

Mr. Gewirtzman, a 75-year-old retired pharmacist


who lives in Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island,
survived the Holocaust by spending almost two
years burrowed with other members of his family
under a pigsty on a Polish farm.

Now, he visits local schools, hoping that by telling of his experiences, he can educate students and help to
prevent a killing like the Holocaust from happening again.

When he spoke at a high school in Queens two years ago, Murekatete, then a student, was in the audience.
She said his story had made her burst into tears. She wrote him a note relating her own horrible story,
which took place in Rwanda , in central Africa , in 1994. She narrowly escaped being hacked to death by a
rival tribe. Her family - both parents and all six siblings - did not.

I finally found someone who understood what I went through because he went through the same thing,
said Murekatete, now 19 and a freshman at the State University at Stony Brook. Mr. Gewirtzman met the
teenager, heard her story and suggested she begin speaking to groups with him.

Mr. Gewirtzman grew up in a small village in Poland and in November 1942, the family persuaded a local
farmer to hide them and some relatives - eight people in all - for 20 months in a small trench below a
pigsty strewn with mud and pig waste. Day after day in the hole, they would argue whether to surrender to
the Nazis, he recalled.

At times my father would yell at me, 'Why did you lead us here? We should have gone to Treblinka and
gotten it over with,' Mr. Gewirtzman said. I'd tell him, 'You may want to die, but don't you want your
children to live?' Then he would snap out of it.

We thought there wasn't a Jew in Europe still alive, but for some reason, I never once doubted we would
survive, he said. Maybe I was too young and naïve, but I never lost hope.

They did not escape until July 31, 1944, when the Nazis retreated.

Murekatete grew up as the second oldest of seven children on a family farm in Rwanda. Her family were
members of a Tutsi tribe. In April 1994, when she was 9, the news came over the radio that the Hutu
president had been killed. Groups of Hutu men and boys wielding guns, machetes and clubs began
descending upon villages, killing Tutsis.

The day they reached her village, Murekatete was visiting her grandmother Magdalene Mukasharangabo
in a nearby village. Her grandmother saved her by taking her to an orphanage.

After two months, she learned from surviving cousins that her family - her mother, father, two sisters, and
four brothers - had been tortured and hacked to pieces with machetes. Most of her other relatives were also
killed, including her grandmother.

She was brought to New York in October 1995, by an uncle who legally adopted her and applied for
political asylum for her. She spoke only Kinyarwanda, but was placed in a fifth-grade class and soon
learned English and began excelling in school.

She said she still sees her family in her dreams. Other times, though, she is chased by the men with
machetes.

I've never gone to a counselor or a therapist, she said. At first, I guess I hoped it might just go away.

She said, "Some of my friends are afraid to ask me about it and I'm not a person who talks about my
problems."

With many cousins, aunts and uncles killed and only a few relatives left, Murekatete has grown close to
Mr. Gewirtzman and his wife, Lillian, a Polish Jew, who had been sent with her family to Siberia for six
years while Russia occupied Poland.

I didn't know what to do with my experience and he showed me, she said when asked about that day.

Mr. Gewirtzman said, In a way, we've become sort of parents to her.

"We both went through a traumatic experience," he said, "but instead of remaining bitter and angry and
seeking revenge, we both resolved to spend the anger in a positive manner, to prevent this from ever
happening again.

Murekatete shows listeners that racial hatred has outlived the Holocaust, and that genocide was not just
something that happened to an old Jewish man from Poland, he said.

When I go to an inner-city school, the kids might think they have nothing in common with some Jews 60
years ago, or me with slavery, he said.

But when they see both of us, they see the problem is the same, he said. It transcends race and
ethnicity. People are still being taught hatred and it is hatred that we are fighting."

Murekatete said, "Sometimes, students ask if they can help, and I say, The best thing you can do for me is
to educate yourselves so this doesn't continue to happen."

Article courtesy of the New York Times, 2005.


Name _________________________________

Holocaust & Rwandan Genocide Survivors


Work Together to educate against Hate
1. What do David Gewirtzman and Jacqueline Murekatete have in common?
a. Both are white.
b. Both are European
c. Both lived through a genocide
d. Both survived the Holocaust

2. How did Gewirtzman survive the Holocaust?


a. By fighting back against Nazis
b. By working in an ammunition factory
c. By hiding in a Polish pigsty
d. By hiding in an orphanage

3. Murekatete is ____.
a. Hutu
b. Tutsi
c. Jewish
d. Bantu

4. How did Murekatete first deal with her experience?


a. She hoped it would just go away
b. She went to a therapist
c. She counseled survivors
d. She went back to Rwanda.

5.
a. They are like co-workers
b. They are like family.
c. The dislike each other.
d. They no longer speak to each other

6. How can students in America help, according to Murekatete?


a. Donate money to survivors
b.
c. Adopt a survivor so he or she can come to America
d. Watch the movie Hotel Rwanda

7. What do you think you would learn if Gewirtzman and Murekatete came to speak at our school?

© Students of History - http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Students-Of-History

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