Holocaust survivor ensures educational efforts continue

As a Holocaust survivor, Saul Reichert sees himself as having a great responsibility to history.

"The six million people who died in the Holocaust (the Second World War-era persecution and extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany) had a wish that the world would not forget what happened to them," the 74-year-old Edmonton restauranteur explains.

In 1944, Reichert and the rest of his family - his mother and five sisters - were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkineau concentration/death camp after surviving harsh conditions of the infamous Polish Lodz Ghetto. Reichert, who was subsequently sent to a slave-labour work camp after spending a month in the death camp, never saw his immediate family again.

As part of this profoundly personal and tragic mission to keep the memories of the Holocaust from fading, Reichert had, for years, spoken in local high schools, delivering moving first-hand accounts of his experiences. But he wanted to do more, keenly aware that he and other survivors are "getting on in years."

The affable entrepreneur and his wife Toby decided to continue this personal Holocaust educational mandate by contributing to a major and lasting pedagogical legacy. Last year, after hearing that Dr. Rudolf Vrba, author of I Escaped from Auschwitz, was coming to speak in Edmonton as part of the University of Alberta's new Annual Holocaust Lecture Series, the couple started thinking about donating to this particular endowment.

After inviting Dr. Vrba and key endowment and community players to make their case at the Reicherts' restaurant - Teddy's on Jasper Avenue - the couple decided to donate $60,000 towards the endowment. This fund now sits at $90,000, only $10,000 short of its $100,000 goal.

The lecture series is the brainchild of Dr. William Pearce and co-ordinated by Franz Szabo, director of the University of Alberta's Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies. Szabo says Central Europe "has long been a cultural and intellectual hothouse of unrivaled proclivity, but it also saw great tragedies on its soil" which is why it's important to devote a lecture series to "the most painful and tragic wound in the history of the 20th century."

For Reichert, the lecture series is an important part of a larger dialogue about justice that he believes every law-abiding citizen needs to participate in, on an ongoing basis, to ensure systematic "injustice against the innocent" doesn't happen again.

As a case in point, Reichert notes that the Holocaust was preceded by a decade of wide-spread injustice against the Jewish population of Germany - an audacious and open persecution which went virtually unchallenged.

"There was lots of injustice that took place between 1933 and 1945. Where were the German judges, teachers, doctors and clergy while this was taking place?"

Underlining both the extreme lawlessness and blatant thugishness of the regime, Reichert explains that soldiers would come into his family's house prior to their banishment to the ghetto and take away "anything that they liked - silver, furs, gold. It was absolute plunder."

Once, his teenage sister was nearly shot in cold blood for resisting when a soldier confiscated her sweater.

"That's why I believe it's important for educators of today to show the world a way to guard against this kind of injustice from rising up again."

This year's speaker will be Christopher Browning, of the University of North Carolina - author of The Origin of the Final Solution. The lecture will be delivered in March.