Holocaust survivor relates past at Laurel Highlands
An afternoon assembly with juniors at Laurel Highlands Senior High School was Moshe Baran’s third speaking engagement this week; the Holocaust survivor has five more engagements this weekend in Erie.
How often does the 91-year-old Pittsburgh resident make presentations?
“As often as they ask me,” Baran said. “Not that many of us go out any more , so when I’m asked, I go.”
Baran is one of five featured speakers with the Holocaust Center of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. He and his late wife Malka lived in Poland during the Holocaust. She survived three years in a concentration camp. He survived in the woods as a resistance fighter. His wife died five years ago, but her story was shared through a documentary filmed by Daniel Love, one of their neighbors, who was a high school student at the time.
“My purpose here is to share with you my life story and a little bit of history,” Baran told the Laurel Highlands students. “The Holocaust did not happen like a hurricane or natural disaster. It had a history.”
Baran recounted how unemployment skyrocketed in Germany following World War I, and as Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power, Jews were blamed for many of the problems in the country, even though Jews made up only one percent of the German population.
“My grandmother and my little sister were responsible for what happened in Germany after World War I, can you imagine that absurdity? Yet it happens over and over,” Baran said.
Baran said he had a happy, normal childhood, where people did normal things like travel, work and worship.
“On September 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland and the Allies declared war on Germany. This is where my story begins,” Baran said. “Within a couple of days, they had taken half of the country.”
Baran lived in the half that fell under the control of the Soviet Union. Life became restrictive, but nothing like it was after June 1941 when Germany turned on the Soviet Union and took over all of Poland.
Baran said that his hometown, Horodok, Poland, was liquidated. It did not exist after the war. First, he said, the Jews were removed from their homes and forced into ghettos surrounded by barbed wire. Only the able-bodied were allowed out to do work for the Germans. In 1942, the women, children and elderly were loaded onto trucks and taken to a vacant barn.
“Once they got everyone into the barn, they machine gunned them, then set the barn on fire. All of the children from my school perished in that inferno,” Baran said.
Baran said that he was able to escape from the ghetto before its destruction in 1943 by digging under the barbed wire and joining the partisans fighting against the Germans.
“We were the only family in our town that had four members survive,” Baran said.
Baran said his wife lost all 60 of her family members to the Holocaust.
“She made it her task to fight hatred,” Baran said. “The most important thing I can say to young people is stand up for justice; say ‘not in my family, not in my neighborhood, not in my town.'”