By Courtney Cooperman ’16, Commentary  Editor

“It’s very, very hard to speak about this.”

Holocaust survivor Marsha Kreuzman labels her story as “difficult to believe” and “gruesome,” so scarring that she cannot bear to retell it twice in the same day.

“It’s too drastic and too hard for me,” stressed Kreuzman, a 90-year-old Livingston resident. “I know that I relive it each time I’m speaking.” Kreuzman has more than ample reason to feel distressed as she recounts the terrors she experienced as a young adult. “For five and a half years of the war, I hadn’t been outside concentration camps and ghettos. It was only barbed wire,” she described.

Yet for the past forty years, Kreuzman has bravely decided to share her story with all willing ears, including school audiences, over fifty individual students as part of a one-on-one twinning program, and, as of January 21^st, the audience of NBC Nightly News. However, the news segment does not focus on the tragedy in Kreuzman’s life, but rather, a heartwarming new discovery.

When the US Army came to liberate the concentration camps, Kreuzman was outside the crematorium at Mauthausen in Austria, weighing 68 pounds and about to face death. A soldier from the 11^th Armored Division came in and picked her up, declaring, “You’re free.” Since she arrived in America 70 years ago, Kreuzman has actively searched for her liberators, without any conclusive success. But a few months ago, while flipping through The Star-Ledger, she noticed an announcement for the 65^th wedding anniversary of the Barbellas, a couple living in Union, New Jersey. In a brief description of the couple, the announcement included that the husband, Joe, was a member of the 11^th Armored Division during World War II, which liberated the concentration camp Mauthausen.

Marsha immediately called the Barbellas and met them the next day. The story ran in the New Jersey Jewish News, then on Channel 4. Marsha Kreuzman had found one of her liberators after seventy years of searching, an optimistic twist to the horrors of her past. She feels blessed that she can personally thank someone who contributed to her survival, even if his arms were not the ones that pulled her up from the ground outside the crematorium.

As audiences nationwide were touched by her tale, Kreuzman’s friends and acquaintances were overjoyed to hear the news, including some members of our school community. Humanities teacher Ms. Schottland immediately called Kreuzman, a personal friend, when she heard her news. “This is very important to her,” Ms. Schottland explained, “She’s living proof that it’s never too late to make a difference in someone’s life, and no matter how old we are, we can still connect to others in meaningful ways.”

Ms. Schottland and Marsha Kreuzman also share the strong belief that Holocaust education is crucial, especially for our generation, as we will be the last to meet Holocaust survivors firsthand. Kreuzman emphasized that although Holocaust education is mandatory in New Jersey, schools are “not doing enough” to inform students about the genocide. Rhonda Fink-Whitman, author and daughter of a Holocaust survivor, uncovered the shameful reality of unawareness in a recent survey conducted on Pennsylvania campuses, which she documented in an alarming video. In accordance with Fink-Whitman’s demonstration, Ms. Schottland hopes that the Newark Academy Holocaust Studies course, which is not running this year, will return soon, allowing students to “arm [them]selves with information.”

Kreuzman also referenced trips to concentration camps as an essential experience to connect to the Holocaust on a deeper level than classroom knowledge. Four years ago, a group of Newark Academy students and teachers traveled to five concentration camps. As Ms. Schottland described, “You can read about history in books, and you can see movies about history, but the most impactful way for me to make these events of the Holocaust real was to actually stand at the gates of Auschwitz, to see in first person the sign, ‘Work makes you free.’ To see that famous gateway into hell was life-altering.”

Thanks to the efforts of Ms. Schottland and others, we will be fortunate to welcome Marsha Kreuzman as this year’s NA Dialogues speaker on April 3rd, a new series tied to the freshman Ancient World curriculum but open to the entire school community. National interest in her recent discovery aside, Kreuzman’s visit provides a crucial opportunity for everyone, even those who are already familiar with the events of the Holocaust, to absorb a firsthand account, empowering us to fight against future injustice and prevent the recurrence of such atrocities.