Holocaust Survivor Speaks at OU 

     University of Oklahoma’s organization Students for Israel hosted the first annual Holocaust
remembrance event Thursday with Holocaust survivor Eva Unterman as the featured speaker.        
     Unterman was asked to speak in observance of Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. This holiday is held every year on the 27th of April, which marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Yonatan Schmidt, the student organizer for the event, moved to the United States from Israel just over a year ago and was disappointed by the lack of commemoration for this holiday.
    “Back home, we have a ceremony every year with four to five thousand members of the community where I lived attending,” said Schmidt.
     This lead him to call his uncle who lived in Tulsa and spends his own money helping to educate teachers in Oklahoma about the Holocaust.
    “I knew that my uncle was good friends with Eva Unterman,” said Schmidt. “So I called him and met up with Eva to ask if she would speak at OU.”
     During the event, Unterman recalled by memory the story of her childhood. Where she spent four years in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland before being relocated to the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dresden and finally Theresienstadt. While Unterman can seemingly remember even the smallest details of those years, from the black S.S. boots to the sound of the cattle car doors closing, her feelings towards the events that happened to her are vague to nonexistent.
    “The only way to describe that to this day was that i was numb, totally numb,” said Unterman after telling about her experience of being hidden in a dried out water well to avoid capture by the S.S. officers. “I remember it as clear in my mind as it could possibly be, but I don’t have any feelings about it, just numbness.”
     She also emphasized how dire the food situation was in the concentration camps, which lead to her story of the hardest day of her childhood. With a single bowl of broth made from beets, water and sparse chunks of potato a day, all of the prisoners were severely malnourished. That is why her grandmother volunteered to “mend socks” for some of the S.S. officers when they offered an extra slice of bread in return. However, “mending socks” was simply a facade, and when the volunteers were outside the officers shot them.
    “I know that my grandmother volunteered to get the extra slice of bread for me,” said Unterman. “Everyone always says the officers were just ‘following orders,’ but these officers had no orders to kill my grandmother. It was purely for entertainment.”
     Unterman has made it her lifelong mission to Holocaust education by telling her story to thousands of students, and will continue doing just this. OU Hillel and Sooners for Israel will also continue the event by cosponsoring speakers in the future.
    “This is just the first of many Holocaust remembrance events that we will have in the years to come,” said Schmidt. Eva Unterman talks about surviving the Holocaust. VIDEO: MEGHAN WHITING, Runtime: ;27