Kinnelon high schoolers hear firsthand from survivors of genocide

by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

David Gewirtzman came to Kinnelon High School on Dec. 2 to share his experiences as a child during the Holocaust. The 77-year-old was accompanied by an unlikely friend, Jacqueline Murekatete. As he put it, she is “young, black, female, Christian, from Africa; I am no-longer-so-young, white, male, Jewish, from Europe.

“But our bond transcends all of those differences.”

That’s because Murekatete, 20, a junior at New York University, is also a Tutsi from Rwanda who survived the 1994 genocide there.

Last week they explained the unimaginable paths that brought them together, speaking to an auditorium filled with the 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-grade classes, as well as the top 20 students of the freshman class.

“We chose life over death and set ourselves a mission to speak for those who can longer speak,” Gewirtzman told the audience at Kinnelon High School.

Filled to capacity, the room was quiet through the entire two-hour presentation, as Murekatete told the students about her “happy childhood” as a girl “with hopes and dreams like you.”

She described how the Hutu-led government slowly dehumanized the ethnic Tutsi in 1994, when she was nine, calling them “cockroaches and snakes who deserved to die.” She escaped the fate of the rest of her family — almost all were killed — because she went to a school not in her home village. She described to the students hiding with others in a government office until the Hutu came for them, of being whisked away in an ambulance driven by a Hutu driver paid off by her uncle, of hiding with her grandmother in the home of a sympathetic Hutu.

“Day and night we hoped someone would come to our aid…. Every day we said the killing will end today,” she said. But she and her grandmother were discovered before the killing stopped. “We were woken up by screams of ‘Open up!’ There was a group of men armed with machetes standing around us. ‘Why do you have cockroaches in your house? They deserve to die,’ they told the man who was hiding us. He pleaded for our lives. Guys, I can’t describe the feeling when you think this would be your last day on earth. I wanted to scream but no sound came out. I remember just shaking and crying in my head, ‘Please, God, make them go away.’”

They did go away, and Murekatete and her grandmother fled. They went to an orphanage run by Italian priests, but they would not admit her grandmother. “Every day children came with arms and legs chopped off with machetes. Some were traumatized by seeing their parents killed in front of them by their neighbors,” she told the students. “But we considered ourselves fortunate.”

She survived the killing, protected in the orphanage. The rest of her family — with the exception only of her grandmother, an uncle, and a cousin — did not. When it was over and the cousin found her, she learned what had happened. “My Hutu neighbors had taken my parents, six siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and all the Tutsi in our village to a nearby river and proceeded to butcher them with machetes…. I could not believe my neighbors would kill my family.”

In 1995, Murekatete came to the United States, where she was adopted by an uncle who had fled years earlier. She learned English, enrolled in school, and eventually moved to Queens. That’s where she first heard Gewirtzman speak, in an address to her high school class.

Along with her classmates, Murekatete wrote him a thank-you note, telling him that her story of suffering was similar to his. She did not expect him to read her letter or that she would hear from him. But not only did Gewirtzman read her note, he invited Murekatete and her uncle to lunch. “She came at noon and stayed until 8,” he told NJ Jewish News. He asked her to join him at speaking engagements, which now include schools and groups around the region, the country, and the world.

‘I started screaming’

Gewirtzman’s story resembles Murekatete’s, although they were separated by continents and half a century.

Gewirtzman described for the students his own “happy childhood” in Losice. The small Polish town was, he said, “like Kinnelon…where Jews and Christians lived in peace. I had friends who were Jewish and Christian. We played soccer and collected stamps. We laughed together…until September 1, 1939” — the day the Nazis invaded Poland.

He described watching as the German army marched into his town, took over his school, and shot people in the square.

He told of the hiding place he convinced his parents to build in the attic of their home, where they went when the Jews confined in the town’s ghetto were told by soldiers in the square to “come down in one hour with not more than 15 pounds of luggage. Anyone who doesn’t come will be shot.”

Gewirtzman recalled, “I started screaming: You want to go, go!’ and I ran up to the hiding place, with my mother and father following me.” Ultimately about 30 people “squeezed in like sardines” in the small room. He watched through a peephole and saw “everyone gathered and start marching. A few hundred people remained, mostly old people and women with strollers who couldn’t march. They said trucks would come for them. Sure enough they did come,” and soldiers on the trucks “proceeded to shoot them. I even saw the officers get down from the truck and take a pistol and shoot an infant in the stroller.”

Those who marched, he would learn later, went to Treblinka, where they were gassed.

Gewirtzman described narrow escape after narrow escape and the two years he hid in a pigsty, “with manure over our heads, with rats, lice, bed bugs. We survived there…until the summer of 1944, when we were liberated by the Russian army.”

Together, Gewirtzman and Murekatete urged their young listeners to intervene to save others threatened by genocide. “The responsibility we have to each other is that it is not okay to hear about someone being killed because of his race, religion, ethnicity, or belief,” said Murekatete.

“There is genocide in Darfur. I urge you to come to their aid…. I encourage you to do all you can to see that genocide will only be in the history books.”

The Kinnelon students appeared ready to respond to the speakers’ call. Tenth-grader Alexandra Doll said, “I thought they were really good. It was good to get the information about the Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda. I’m definitely going to buy a bracelet,” she said, referring to a peer effort to sell bracelets, with proceeds benefiting victims of the violence in the Sudan region of Darfur.

Some students, like Andrei Valdivia, acknowledged he knew little about either situation and had gained “a whole new outlook.” “I didn’t know all that stuff happened — the killing in Poland and Rwanda,” he said. Asked whether he might take action, he thought for a moment, but shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Senior Nick Warren was impressed with the impact of the visitors’ firsthand experience. “They really know what happened. It’s not just someone saying this happened.” And his friend Charlie Roselius appreciated hearing from survivors, particularly from Gewirtzman. “Our kids won’t have the opportunity to hear from survivors of the Holocaust,” he said. “Hopefully, they won’t have any other survivors of genocide to hear from either.”

Johanna Ginsberg can be reached at jginsberg@njjewishnews.com.

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