Survivor speaks

In 1940, Arnold Wininger sat at a train station in Northern Italy, waiting for the Italians to decide if he and the other Jewish refugees traveling in the car would be let in the country.

Now half a century later, Wininger was in town to share his story of living through the Holocaust to high school students at both Permian and Odessa High School.

"Those were the longest moments, waiting there on the tracks. It was that last half hour I’ll never forget," Wininger told the students of Odessa High School.

The Italian Red Cross intervened and let him into the country.

"Understand they were still at war, they didn’t have to do this. They could have turned us away, but they didn’t. I must have had an angel, a guardian angel looking over my shoulder," he said, with a sudden smile, still grateful.

While growing up Jewish in Leipzig, Germany, Wininger watched the Nazis rise to power. One day in November 1938, he arrived at school only to be told he should probably go home. It was Kristallnacht, "Night of Broken Glass" and Jewish homes, schools, businesses and synagogues were ransacked. His school was in flames.

Wininger’s father was taken into a concentration camp, where he died in April 1940, and as the Germans started rounding up boys 15 and older, the rest of the family, his mother and his brother, decided that Wininger should leave Germany. He never saw them again.

He got to Yugoslavia and found a way out as the Germans came into the country, looking for Jews. He made his way to Italy, where he worked in the fields. Wininger again found himself in German occupied territory and had to flee to Switzerland, neutral territory.

After a sympathetic citizen cut the barbed wire, he and a group of refugees crept under it, delicately, because a single touch would set off the bells hung all along the wire fence.

Speaking to a crowd of student onlookers, whose faces have been washed clean of the usual teenage boredom as they soak up the words and stare at a man that lived through something they have only read about in history books, Wininger let the facts of his story speak for itself.

Wininger admits he spent years not talking about his story, even to his children, but decided it was important to share what he had lived through and seen, important for children to hear about the importance of tolerance.

"Prejudice is something nobody is born with. No baby is born with it, it is learned in the home, in school or on the playground," Wininger said.

He went on to tell the students that sometimes people don’t like each other, but you should never dislike someone just because of their color or religion or things like that. He warned them to avoid extremists in all cases and to try and judge people based on their character before anything else.

"It’s very important we learn that we have to tolerate each other. You are the future leaders of your nation — you must learn this," he said.

At the end of his lecture, Wininger recited a poem and had everyone in the auditorium clasp hands in an enormous tangled chain of people, while he said the serenity prayer and asked them to keep prejudice out of their lives.

University of Texas of the Permian Basin history professor Roland Spickermann, who sat in on the event, said that the chance to see and hear a Holocaust survivor was an important opportunity. Spickermann teaches German and Third Reich history at UTPB.

"Personal experiences are generally far more effective than reading something out of a book. To meet a survivor is an important thing," Spickermann said.

Odessa High School history teacher Katie Palmer echoed his sentiments.

"I feel like our students are desensitized to things. They don’t understand the atrocities. To see someone who has actually been through the experience makes it more real to them than me lecturing them ever could," Palmer said.

As the students filed out of the building, they were talking and laughing, but some of them got the point.

"It was very important because it shows us what things were like back then and how important it is to fight for what’s right," Odessa High School sophomore Joshua Sparks said.

FROM THE TALK

"First they came for the communist, and I did not speak out — because I was not a communist.

"Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.

"Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.

"Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me."

— Pastor Martin Niemöller