Quinn visits QCC on a ‘Day Out Against Hate’

At the Kupferberg Holocaust Center on the Queensborough Community College (QCC) campus in Bayside, Director Arthur Flug routinely asks students: “Four young men were driving down a main street, when two thugs in a car shouted, ‘We don’t want your kind here!’ Then the four boys were cut off and beaten with a club. Where and when do you think this happened?”
Usually, Flug said, the answer given is “Germany in the 1930s.”
On Thursday, November 29 middle-schoolers from South Ozone Park, visiting dignitaries and Holocaust survivors gathered at QCC heard the answer.
“It was about a mile from here on Northern Boulevard, in Douglaston Queens, in 2006,” Flug said.
The “Interactive Discussion between Holocaust Survivors and Students” was Queens’ observance of a city-wide “Day Out Against Hate,” announced early last month by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and witnessed by a host of legislators and concerned citizens.
Quinn attended the conference, along with 33 students from Grade 8 at M.S. 266 who were seated up front, as the third stop on her city-wide tour to affirm the city’s intolerance of hatred and hate crimes.
Along with Borough President Helen Marshall, who spoke as an African-American woman and QCC President Eduardo Mart’, a Cuban by birth, Quinn, the first openly-lesbian mayoral candidate, addressed the audience of nearly 200 on particular aspects of hate.
They also heard from Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown, who explained in his cathedral-organ baritone, “These acts (of hate) tear at the very fabric of society … acts predicated on violence and hate will never be tolerated.”
A series of slides illustrating institutionalized hate, from all over the world, including Nazi-occupied Europe, Cambodia, the Deep South, and Milo, Maine (where the Ku Klux Klan held their first rally in daylight, in 1923) provided a backdrop to a panel of five Holocaust survivors, one of whom lives within blocks of Flug’s example.
Eddie Weinstein, from Cambria Avenue in Little Neck, by way of Poland, related a story of hunger and hiding. He told of being identified to the police by a neighbor, because he was a Jew.
Weinstein, who travels the country making his testimony, struck the focal note of the day when he explained, “All this happened because hate was not a crime, but a matter of government policy.”
Before passing the microphone, Weinstein said to the students, “You are the last generation who will hear first-hand of the Holocaust.” He pointedly reminded them, “It was the most civilized country in Europe that tried to murder the Jews. You must be vigilant against hate.”
The most graphic testimony came from 101-year-old Manhattanite Max Hirschorn of Poland, when he introduced himself as “Number eleven thousand, six hundred and fifteen,” holding out his left forearm.
Hirschorn, survivor of four of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps (Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen) and two “death marches,” could only say, “I was a strong man … I suffered too much.”
When a student asked if seeing the number tattooed on his arm reminded him of the Holocaust, he replied, “No, it’s always with me.”
Flug prodded the panelists to recount their age during their story, so that students could try to identify with hiding in the woods for 17 months at the age of 14, or what they would do if another Hitler came to power when they were nine.
That realization motivated some of the questions. “How did you manage to sneak out of the ghetto for food, with the walls and barbed wire and all the guards?” one student asked.
The answer was, “When you are hungry enough, you figure out a way.”
It was obvious that the school group, which itself reflected the diversity of Queens, had difficulty fathoming how such things could happen, as asked by a young girl in a head-scarf.
Steven Berger of Little Neck, via Hungary said, “I’ve been thinking about it for 70 years and I still can’t figure it out.”