Imagine being a happy child, 12 years old, raised in a loving, warm and intelligent family. One even has the works - a mom, dad, maternal grandfather (a rabbi) and 7-year-old sister.
Then imagine in one fell swoop it is all taken from you, all you ever knew, even your neighbors and your town were gone.
This happened to Nina Katz. She is a Holocaust survivor.
"My grandfather told me to love my neighbor, be my brother's keeper, and thou shalt not kill," she said. "With a background like that, Hitler did not win with me."
The only surviving member of her family, Katz spoke to an audience at the Rose Theatre yesterday.
Born in Poland, she was at Auschwitz from 1939 until 1945, when she was 18 years old. She was liberated in 1945 by Russian soldiers but was alerted that the war was over by the British. At the time she was liberated, she was a scant 57 pounds. She was 5 feet 7 inches.
"If the war had ended six months later, we all would have been dead," Katz said. "No one had committed a crime, just born of the wrong religion."
Since her liberation and her subsequent arrival to segregated America in the early 1950s, Katz has been a staunch supporter of civil rights for all people.
"Not a great place for a survivor of the Holocaust to be," she said.
Carrie Brooks, University project coordinator for the Institute for Faculty Excellence in Judicial Education, invited Katz to speak at the event.
"Reliving her experience in the concentration and labor camps is a terribly difficult process for her," Brooks said. "So I have great admiration for her because of this."
Katz is also a U of M adult education doctoral student.
Katz said she has seen and lived through too much. Two images are particularly horrifying to her.
"There was a mother breastfeeding her child when a soldier with a gun on one hand, a vodka bottle in the other, ripped her baby from her arms and kicked it around like a human football against a wall," she said. "When the mother was hysterical, and he shot her in front of us."
The other image involves young boys being strung up on trees with their faces blue and bulging.
Katz has affected many lives positively, one of whom is Jerry Bobbitt, an integrated studies sophomore.
He said he has learned how to be more tolerant since hearing her story.
"When I listen to her talk it reminded me that a lot of college students do not care about anything," Bobbitt said. "She gives us something more to think about.
Bobbitt also attended her speech last year and was so moved by her he wrote her a letter that she still has.
"If I can change one mind, I know I am making a difference," Katz said.
Brooks said Bobbitt's letter embodied the ideas she hoped her students and other attendees would receive.
"The message I want students to take with them is one of love, forgiveness, perseverance and strength," she said.
