WASHINGTON TOWNSHIP – The message was personal, heartfelt and powerful. Holocaust survivor Werner Reich, who joined Orchard Valley Middle School seventh-grade students for an assembly one day shy of his 88th birthday, implored them to take heed of a valuable lesson that he learned from his difficult, life-altering experiences. "Don't be indifferent. Indifference kills. Don't be a good person who...
WASHINGTON TOWNSHIP - The message was personal, heartfelt and powerful. Holocaust survivor Werner Reich, who joined Orchard Valley Middle School seventh-grade students for an assembly one day shy of his 88th birthday, implored them to take heed of a valuable lesson that he learned from his difficult, life-altering experiences. "Don't be indifferent. Indifference kills. Don't be a good person who does nothing. Help each other. Be sincere. We all need each other, and we have to stick together. Be nice to each other so you can live in a nice world and have a beautiful life."
Holocaust Survivor Werner Reich, Orchard Valley Middle School Teacher Christopher Spina and Author William Rauscher came together before the presentation. Reich, a teenager in 1944 in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, under the supervision of the infamous Josef Mengele (aka "The Angel of Death"), shared vivid, poignant and painful memories of his teenage years, when after hiding for two years, he was arrested by the Gestapo at age 15. He moved to several concentration camps before arriving at age 16 at Auschwitz, where the lives of 1.1 million people were methodically and mercilessly extinguished. When he was liberated in May of 1945, he was 17 years old and weighed 47 pounds.
"I didn't know if I would be dead or alive from one day to the next," Reich said, "and there was nothing I could do about it. I was a teenager. All teenagers believe they are indestructible, so I believed that I would survive. The problem was there were thousands and thousands of teenagers who believed the same thing, and they didn't."
Reich detailed the unspeakable and random violence that defined his youth and resulted in the deaths of 12 million people and related it to the issues of bullying that students face today, repeating his mantra throughout his presentation, "All that is needed for evil to exist is for good people to do nothing."
Reich was joined by author William Rauscher who chronicled his story and that of fellow Holocaust survivor Herbert Nivelli in a soon to be released book, "The Death Camp Magicians."
"We feel extraordinarily honored to have had the opportunity to have a first-hand recollection of this history," OVMS teacher Christopher Spina said. "This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us, and it was significant since, in 2015, we mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II and the year that the U.S. Army discovered the concentration camps."
