Libman to share harrowing story of survival for Holocaust Education Week

November 1, 2017 · 0 Comments

By Brock Weir

To this day, Faigie Libman can’t bring herself to own a pair of white gloves.
As a child growing up in Lithuania during the Second World War, her young life – and those of her family members – were turned upside down on June 4, 1941 when government directives came down ordering her family, and countless others, into a ghetto.
Life was bad in the ghetto, she says, but it soon became a lot worse when her family was ordered out to Democracy Square to be counted.
The sight of the official standing on the mound, holding a whip in his white-gloved hand, a dog at his side, is a picture still vivid in her mind, as he divided her family up into different camps, Faigie and grandmother and parents, separated from her grandfather and aunt.
Their first stop was a labour camp where children were often left behind with the elderly who couldn’t work as they set out for their forced labour.
“One day, my mother was waking me early, early in the morning and she said she had permission to take me to work with her,” Ms. Libman recalled in a video shared by the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies last year. “I went with the men in the trucks far away from the labour camp to work at the aerodrome. We were there for the whole day and I remember very late at night we were taken back into the labour camp. I will remember as long as I live what greeted us as we got into that labour camp. I can still in my head hear the wailing.
“What happened that day when I was at work with all the men and my mother, trucks came and collected all the children and all the old people. It was labelled the Kinderaction and without even knowing I am sure the parents knew where those trucks went. The word Auschwitz, everyone heard without any communications and later on the parents found out they were all taken to Auschwitz. To this day I do not have one friend from my youth.”
Ms. Libman will share her harrowing story of survival with the Aurora community next Thursday, November 9, to mark Holocaust Education Week.
The Aurora United Church will host Ms. Libman from 7 – 9 p.m. at Trinity Anglican Church, where she will speak of her experiences in the Kovno Ghetto, slave labour and concentration camps.
Aurora United Church is just one community group holding special events to commemorate Holocaust Education Week.
Activities begin Tuesday, November 7, from 7 – 9 p.m. as Amnesty International Aurora-Newmarket welcomes guest speaker and human rights expert Professor Lee Jacobs of York University.
The topic of his conversation is, “The Holocaust & Human Rights: What Rights Jews Lost in WWII, the Impact of the Holocaust on the Passing of an International Human Rights Charter, and the Legacy of Both.” The talk will also take place at Trinity Anglican Church (79 Victoria Street).
Both events are free and open to the public.
“I go now from school to school, they send me and I do not say no,” Ms. Libman shared with the Centre. “I go because I want to speak to young people and we have to tell people what Hitler did. My motto is: If there is hatred in your heart there is no room for love.”