Learning from history

Last week some kids at the Gorham Middle School got the rare opportunity to get a history lesson from someone who lived through it.

Julia Skalina, a native of Czechoslovakia who moved to the United States in 1975, spoke about her experiences during one of the most horrifying periods in modern world history, the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.

The talk in Gorham marked the 100th time Skalina has spoken to students about the horrors she witnessed in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Allendorf as a young girl. Skalina said she felt the Holocaust was the biggest hate crime of the 20th century, and she hoped her lessons would help deter hate crimes in the future.

“I have to speak up for those who never could,” she said.

Indeed, by speaking out about her experiences and what she witnessed, Skalina is giving a voice to those who can no longer speak and putting a face on one of the world’s most horrific tragedies.

And that’s what makes Skalina’s work so valuable. It’s easy to be detached from the Holocaust when its simply a story in a history book or a movie, like “Schindler’s List.” It’s much more difficult to ignore when someone who has experienced it is telling her story in person.

Skalina told the students she lost most of her family in the Holocaust. She said only 120 of the 900 Jews in her hometown survived, and only four of the 24 members of her family taken to the concentration camps survived. Skalina told the students she lost her mother, father and grandmother, among other relatives to the Nazis.

The students seemed to be affected by Skalina’s words. “I bet it’s really hard” to talk about it “because it brings back a lot of bad memories,” said one student.

While the memories are bad, it’s important for them to be heard, because the lessons they teach are still applicable today. While the Holocaust is a 60-year-old memory, hate crimes and genocide still plague the world.

Over the past few years, the American Journal has printed several stories about Rev. Mutima Peter, a native of the Congo who has been working for peace in his civil war-torn country.

In his visits to his native land, Peter has been a first-hand witness to genocide, telling of one refugee camp that was wiped out after guerillas surrounded it with a ring of fire to prevent anyone from escaping and then killed everyone in the village.

And in December, Peter narrowly escaped death when a car that he had been riding in was attacked by guerillas. The car was riddled with bullets from automatic weapons, and the driver of the car was slashed with a knife. Peter was not in the car at the time of the attack.

It’s not just in far-off countries. Every day in the United States, there are stories of someone who is a victim of a crime simply because of their race, religion, sexual orientation or a variety of other factors.

So, while Skalina’s words are rooted in history, their meaning is still very pertinent now. “The scars of the Holocaust remain with us to the end of our lives,” she said. “It was something so inhuman, so terrible. I will never understand how human beings can stoop so low.”

Here’s hoping that people like Peter and Skalina who, in their own ways, are fighting hate and genocide, get through to the younger generations. Because learning about the horrors of the past is the only way to stop the horrors from happening again.

As philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

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