DANIA BEACH, Fla. – An 86-year-old Holocaust survivor recently worked on an innovative project that will allow students to ask her questions about her experience in the future.
Stella Sonnenschein said she doesn’t understand the hate that fuels evil. She was born in 1935 in Warsaw, Poland, and she was just 4 years old when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. A Catholic woman smuggled her out of the Jewish ghetto when she was 7 and helped her to adopt a new identity as an orphan to keep her safe.
In 1943, her parents were still in the Warsaw ghetto when there was an uprising and a fire that turned the sky red. It was their opportunity to escape. They bribed firefighters to get their uniforms and fled. Her brother didn’t make it. The Nazis killed him. The loss of her brother and the memories of the ghetto still haunt her.
“There was one particular little girl who was sitting always like against the wall and the little brother, a little baby, maybe 2 years old and two days later, she was there and the little boy was laying on the floor with newspaper covering him and flies were going over him. He was dead.”
Sonnenschein told the rest of her story during three days of recording in a studio with several cameras in Dania Beach. The digital project is by The University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994.
The foundation collects testimony about the Holocaust and other genocides. Kori Street has devoted years to the USC Shoah Foundation and the mission is to educate in order to prevent the crimes from happening again. She said the interactive biography will help Sonnenschein educate many generations.
“It really allows you to still have a conversation with a survivor or to approximate that ― even after the survivors are no longer here,” Street said.
Rositta E. Kenigsberg said Sonneschein’s testimony is powerful. She is the president of The Holocaust Documentation & Education Center, a nonprofit organization in South Florida that has been recording the memories of survivors since 1980. She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and was born in the displaced persons’ camp of Bindermichel in Austria.
“We know by doing all of this, is that this will live on in perpetuity,” Keningsberg said.
Street, Kenigsberg, Sonnenschein, and others involved in the project are following the conflict in Ukraine with great concern. The cruelty of war is familiar. Also participating in the project are about 2,300 other witnesses of the Holocaust.
“To me ‘Never Again!’ is really that 50 years from now somebody should know that it existed, and if you are not careful and if you don’t stand by and don’t say anything, it’s going to happen again,” Sonnenschein said.