She sorevivió the Holocaust and our help to see what we will call olvidar

When Buba Weisz Sajovits y su hermana, Icu, llegaron a Veracruz in 1946, su hermana burgemeester, Bella, las estaba esperando junto al muelle. Bella, who lived in Mexico with his wife since the decade of 1930, insists he did not talk about what happened in the war. Vida debía vivirse con miras al futuro, no al pasade.

As for Buba — whose name is Miriam, but he always called him by his side — he lived to see what was happening. If it happened to another emigrant immediately from a concentration camp, Luis Stillmann, who has a history related to an article he passed. Tuvieron dos hijas, luego cuatro nietos, luego cinco bisnietos. She opened a beauty salon, which has much to offer. Converted to pillars of the Jewish community in Mexico City. Stay on your way to the road.

Only I have a record of the past that Buba has not been able to finish, and that he was grabbed permanently in the internal part of his antebrazo izquierdo: A-11147. This alphanumeric code is written in his memory, a phrase that is used as the title of his memoirs, “Getatoeëer in my geheue”. Decades passed, when he was more than 60 years old, he decided to dedicate himself to painting and displaying the images of his past will cover more.

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How can we understand the value of an event like the Holocaust or a place like Auschwitz? There is a book dedicated to this subject, from Hannah Arendt’s Occult Tradition to Elie Wiesel’s Noche. También also visited Auschwitz, he was caught by the infamous via the train, he crossed the crematorium, he saw the huge pillars of zapatos and the repulsive mountains of human cable.

Without embarrassment, there is always a break between what we know and what we understand, a break that takes place when there is no way to salvage the distance through the medium of personal experience. We know that 1.3 million people, of whom a Jewish mayor was abducted, executed by the Nazis in Auschwitz and 1.1 million by those assassinated, all of them in gas chambers. We have tens of miles of testimonials of sovereignty and liberators of the concentration camp, huge amounts of documentary and photographic proofs, autobiography and legal declaration signed by his commander.

But let me know that the details are accumulated, informing and adorning the time. The information is statistical; the statistics are vuelven abstract concepts. The personal memoirs, such as If It’s a Primo Levi Man, rescued the human dimension, but always had an interim period between the written word and the reader’s imagination. The films like Schindler’s list also realize the human element, but corroborate the risk of caer in semificialization. You can do that Auschwitz appears less, no more, real.

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When Buba started to paint, “he could not draw a circle”, he recorded his monica. “But all that is done in life, it is limited and it is well done”.

In her native Cluj-Napoca — Kolozsvár, for her Hungarian residents — in Transylvania, she was a champion cyclist in her school. On May 31, 1944, she, together with Icu (pronounced Itzu), her fathers, Bernard and Lotte, as well as the rest of the Jewish people were deported to Auschwitz in wagons by wagons, a journey of humiliation and hambre that duro cinco días. Buba, who tenía 18 years at the moment, he has his parents for the last time at night when he goes to camp, when his father goes to the lane to get married to his bachelor’s diplomas.

In Buba it is assigned a factory work. It has access to comedy additional rations, which it shares with its partner companies. A day, the llamaron in the cubicle of the former of the pavilion, a precision that stays in the load of the discipline in the barracks. The old man cried out to Buba with brusquedad and the empyjó a los brazos de un hombre que la staba esperando.

“Reuní toda la fuerza que tenía y corrí”, narró.

How can we understand what it means to be a Jewish, humble and deserving woman who needs to go through her life to escape a violinist from Auschwitz? No podemos. Yo nee puedo. But in 2002, Buba painted the stage and traversed his painting to find a distillery of what matters to the most vulnerable person in the world.

“I would like to lose my job and my race”, added with indifference.

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For the past 14 years, Buba has been united in a school protest against the German decree ordering Romania to transfer Transylvania to Hungary. A classmate the apartment of an employee. “What are you doing here, Judea?” Ni siquiera eres rumana ”. At the post office, they were obliged to bring emerald stars, they were forbidden to enter public places, they would be placed in their houses and in the ghetto of Cluj. Dehumanization was thus the prerequisite for Auschwitz as its direct consequence.

Appearing that one of the first German officials that Buba recorded had been seen on the camp by Josef Mengele. “With one more post to tone for an opera”, recuerda; I will listen to the melody of El Danubio azul mientras les senalaba a los prisioneros en qué fila formarse.

Icu the formaron in the same file as his mother, but she sent vuelta to the file of Buba. It is a fact that Lotte Sajovits did not do so, but the last deliberate decision was made in her life on the gas chamber.

In an interview that Buba said in 2017 at the Estadounidense Memorial Memorial of the Holocaust, he related to another encounter with the infamous doctor: “We know that there is no consultation or a hospital where Mengele works. Era wrede, como no tienes Iddi. Nos acostaron y no tengo idea de qué ocurrió. It’s possible that our hayan dormido … Can not say what he hizo despu ”.

Buba also paints this and that, in its own words, “free colors”. Pese a su escal escala, la burgemeester maldad de Auschwitz a fin de radicaba cuentas radicaba en el hecho de que el assesinato y la tortura eran clinicos, algo que yo no comprendía del todo hasta que vi la pintura de Buba. If notan the animals of the stage llevan puestas batas blancas.

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Nueve días antes de que el Ejército Rojo liberara a los cautivos de Auschwitz, Buba y su hermana estuvieron entre los 56.000 prisioneros que fueron obligatar a marcher 56 kilometer in pleno invierno. At least 15,000 de los que emprendieron el trayecto desde Auschwitz murieron. The rest, together with Buba and Icu, were able to board trains via Germany.

When a practice was lost the war, the determination of the Nazis to kill Jews in Cesaba.

“Las Schutzstaffel nos hicieron formar una sola fila”, Buba said about the march. “Eliminaban has one of these diez mujeres. I’m going to Icu lado for us to take the same destination ”.

No fue asi. Icu and the liberated fueron from the Bergen-Belsen camp, the 15th of April by the British court. Ninguna painting of Buba prays me more than in that she appears alone, with the cabeza between her brazos escuálidos, the album of puas from her front, the chimenea, aún ardiendo detrás of her, no muyjos.

“I wonder what I should have done with the freedom that acababan otorgarme”, thought Buba. “I love you so much.” How much better is this image to help you understand the little that power means to the life for which you have lost so much?

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Buba dejó de pintar hace unos años. Now, 95 years old, one of only 2,000 Auschwitz survivors to be seen living. On the other hand, Luis, who sorevivió on the camp of Mauthausen, has 99. For me, both personalities that mean judi: member of a religion that values ​​as much life as memory and creates that we live better, and understand better, when we record well.

In this month of Holocaust remembrance, let the pen take a break and consider how the memory, and the art, of a valiant woman will help us to see what we will do.

(c) The New York Times

Bret L. Stephens has the column of the opinion of the Times since April of 2017. We won a Pulitzer Prize for his comments in The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor and editor of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook

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