Holocaust about lives, not 'dry facts'

Ruth Schwager managed to emigrate from Germany before the Holocaust. Schwager's parents, however, couldn't get visas. She never saw them again.

On Friday, Schwager, 93, escorted by her son, Pete Schwager, lit a memorial candle at the Yom HaShoah/Holocaust Memorial Commemoration in the Salt Lake City Main Library.

Pete Schwager, who was 3 years old when his mother brought him first to Great Britain, then to the United States, said it's important to make sure the Holocaust is remembered as "more than just dry facts." "It was not only 6 million Jews, but 5 million others also died," he said.

Those who gathered for the Friday ceremony were there to remember the lives lost during the genocide and to raise awareness of anti-Semitism that remains.

Attorney General Mark Shurtleff tearfully recalled a recent visit to Israel, where a nightclub near his hotel was blown up by terrorists. He said, "Mrs. Schwager, that hatred that took your family still exists."

Shurtleff delivered Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.'s declaration of May 6-12 as Days of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust.

Shurtleff said he has questioned how the Holocaust could have happened.

"The bottom line is, it happened because people didn't stand up for the rights of everybody," he said.

Kathren Brown, professor at Utah Valley State College, said, "The best we can offer the unnamed dead is remembrance."

She recalled how letters, written before and during the Holocaust to her American great-grandfather by European Jews, were burned during a disagreement between her mother and aunt.

"They are now forgotten because of a stupid family dispute," Brown said, of those who wrote the letters. "I don't know if the families in the letters survived . . . millions of victims of the Holocaust risk being forgotten."

The memory of the Holocaust victims was illustrated in verse when Cantor Laurence Loeb sang a haunting German poem, "Stille, Stille," written during the Holocaust.

He first spoke the verses in English: "Be quiet," he said. "There are graves growing here."

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E-mail: dbulkeley@desnews.com