New Jersey Jewish News
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A tale of two genocides
Rwandan and Jewish survivors bear witness at Shoa memorial

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

Two people separated by continents and decades and by race and ethnicity, yet linked by a terrible bond of suffering, came together in a crowded hotel ballroom May 18 as the city of Newark held its 19th annual observance of the Holocaust.

Under the theme “Fighting Genocide, Bridging Generations,” a 21-year-old Rwandan college student named Jacqueline Murekatete and a 78-year-old Polish Jew named David Gewirtzman shared a podium at the Robert Treat Hotel.

They joined to remind an interracial audience of community leaders, politicians, and, most notably, 400 of Newark’s middle school students, that racial and religious hate must be challenged long before they become preconditions of ethnic mass murder.

Speaking painfully of the parallels in their lives, the young woman and elderly man spoke of the tragedies they had witnessed and experienced.

Leading off the two keynote addresses, Murekatete told the audience that before her country’s brief but efficient spasm of ethnic cleansing began in 1994, her life was “characterized by the happiness and the dreams of a nine-year-old child.”

When rampaging Hutus came to her village, Murekatete was spared from slaughter because she was visiting her grandmother in another province during her spring break from school.

“When the massacres began, I could not comprehend what was happening,” she said. But she remembered radio broadcasts calling her tribespeople, the Tutsis, “cockroaches” and “snakes,” words that incited the Hutus to attack their neighbors, most often with machetes.

The girl and her grandmother hid in a county government office building.

Then an uncle found a Hutu family willing to hide them until her grandmother later placed Murekatete in an orphanage run by Italian priests.

But the older woman was not so fortunate.

“There was a group of about seven men armed with machetes,” Murekatete told her stunned listeners. “I can still remember the machetes and the blood dripping down onto my face and knowing full well my grandmother had died and being so terrified. It is very difficult to describe when you have the realization that this might be your last day on earth. They are standing over you with machetes, and any second they can hack you to death.”

Once the killing ended, her uncle — who had managed to hide from the murderers — broke down crying as he told her their Hutu neighbors had “taken my family to a nearby river where they butchered them. I refused to believe it. It didn’t make sense to me.”

A hiding place

Gewirtzman told a grimly similar tale of a “normal life,” growing up as one of 8,000 Jews in the Polish town of Losice, which was shattered when the Nazis invaded in 1939.

When they came to his town, the Nazis moved into the building that had been his school and “almost immediately, life for Jewish people changed.”

First, a dozen men and boys were rounded up and executed. Then women and children were beaten with nail-studded bats until they collapsed, then thrown out of windows onto the sidewalks below. Those who survived were forced to wear armbands with yellow stars affixed to them.

Eventually, the Germans issued an edict that Jewish children would no longer be allowed to attend class. A “clandestine sort of PTA was formed, and another group of parents organized a clandestine school,” where, Gewirtzman said, he learned everything from the English language to the preparations for his becoming a bar mitzva.

In 1941, the Jews were “squeezed into a ghetto of only two square blocks.” After word of Jewish massacres came from a cousin who lived in another town, Gewirtzman said, he “prevailed on my father to build a hiding place.”

They lived in secret in an attic behind double walls. From hiding, his friends and family watched the other Jews forced to march away to the railroad station, while those too feeble to walk were mowed down by gunfire.

Then Gewirtzman and his sister were caught by the Nazis, who imprisoned them and threatened them with execution. But by mistake, his jailors killed a Christian boy and girl who had been arrested for stealing clothes from the evacuated Jewish ghetto. Gewirtzman and his sister were freed three days later. She was hidden by the Polish police officers who had arrested her. At the same time, his nine-year-old brother managed to conceal himself in a haystack, where he remained undetected for two years.

Gewirtzman and his parents found a farmer, “a wonderful man,” who dug a hole beneath a pig sty and allowed them to live there for nearly two years, until Poland was liberated by the Russian Army in 1944.

“I did not want to live in Poland any longer. In my town, out of 8,000 Jewish people who lived there, only 16 survived.”

Both Gewirtzman and, decades later, Murekatete eventually found asylum in the United States — and found each other. Murekatete moved to Queens, where, as a sophomore in an English class at Martin Van Buren High School, she read Elie Wiesel’s Night. Gewirtzman, who became a pharmacist in his adopted land, visited the class as a guest lecturer. Murekatete said she started to cry because “I knew what happened to him happened to me.” The young African and the Polish-born Jew have been making joint appearances in many parts of the country for the past four years.

“She — black from Africa. Female. A Christian. I, no longer young. White. Male. A Jew from Europe,” said Gewirtzman. “Yet our bonds transcend all these differences. Both of us met death and came back without allowing anger and bitterness to overwhelm us. We chose chaim. Life over hate.”

And both choose to tell their stories so others perhaps won’t have to.

“I have a responsibility to share my story in hopes of preventing what happened to me happening to anyone,” said Murekatete. “I would not wish this upon my worst enemy. I never thought genocide would happen in my country. I never thought it would happen to me. But genocide can happen anywhere.”

“We have an obligation to tell the world what happened,” concurred Gewirtzman. “It may save future generations.”

In a brief address following the two keynote speeches, 84-year-old Martha Klein told the audience that after serving time in a Hungarian labor camp she was one of two survivors in a cattle car bound for the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where they were destined for extermination. But liberation saved them from the gas chambers.

“We must stop killing,” said the Hungarian-born survivor who now resides in Livingston. “We must love each other instead of hate. This is the message of our time.”

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