"The Boy Who Refused to Die" - Telling My Story

When I gave my first talk at Francis Parker in Chicago, I began a journey that would prove to be a second career for me, and one that I loved. And it was also, unknown to me, a significant stage in healing myself.

As a result of my first speaking engagement, I met staff associated with an organization known as Facing History And Ourselves. This organization focuses on assisting school children in learning about the Holocaust and other major historical events and how to think about the moral decisions that both leaders and ordinary people make when confronted with prejudice, hatred, and temptations to de-humanize others. Eventually I would serve on the advisory board of this organization, and I would receive many invitations to speak at teacher institutes and schools in the Chicago area. It has been very exciting and rewarding for me to stand before sometimes hundreds of kids and to tell them my story.

And that is what I have attempted to do: tell my story. Unlike many other survivors that have also told their stories in classrooms, I have felt no sense of duty to tell my story so that the world would remember. I was more selfish. I do it for myself and also because I am a ham and love to be in front of an audience. Moreover, from the start, I have told my story from the perspective of eight year old Sevek. I have tried to recapture for my audiences the emotions and thinking of an eight year old who by the time he is fourteen finds himself certainly stripped of his manners and civil behavior, if not much of his humanity. I have avoided geopolitical analyses, attempting to lecture the students and teachers about lessons from history. I have been confident from the beginning, that my sole job is to tell my story with as much of the unvarnished truth as I think my audience can understand and tolerate. I have ardently believed that if I tell my story truthfully and candidly, my audiences--even, no especially, special education students--will find the parallels and meanings for their own lives.

I know what this approach has done for others because they have shared with me their reactions and because, in some cases, I have experienced significant and deep relationships with both students and adults that sprung from telling my story. But I also know what this approach has done for me.

When I began telling my story, it was all about me. I presented myself as this young boy who survived by his wits and a run of good luck. Some of the events and people I described in my story were rather hazy and I was glad my audiences would not ask detailed questions because I could not in fact often remember the details. The lack of remembering details and even events that I knew must have taken place reached a crescendo when I was invited to return to England in 1995 to be with the "Boys" and celebrate our survival. I would listen to other survivors both from among the "Boys" and others and even though I had been with them in the same physical space and time, I could not remember what they described.

I thought about doing hypnosis, I thought about finding a therapist who would help me unlock my memory. And most of all I was concerned about telling the truth. Sometimes I have wondered about what some other survivors have reported in their stories; sometimes it seems they may be inventing people and events to make their stories more dramatic. And I was hypersensitive to this possibility in myself. I know I like to tell a good story, a story better than anyone else's. So I knew that I needed to pay particular attention to telling my story as I remembered at that moment.

As I continued telling my story over and over again two things happened. One, my story started to become more complete, events and people who were hazy started to emerge. And notably I was no longer the hero, the smart, homeless, and driven young boy who survived on his own wits. I began to remember people who were like angels appearing from nowhere to save my life. My brother and father were certainly angels; their lives would have been much simpler in the camps without me to worry about. And, if you have read or heard my story, you have encountered some of these angels.

Not only did my importance in these events begin to take on its proper proportions, I began to feel differently about some of the events that haunted me for all of my adult life. To me the most shameful episode in my life was what I considered my abandoning of my father in Buchenwald. Yet as I continued to tell and retell this episode from my life, I found it easier to live with this shame. Soon I just simply accepted it as something from the past that I could not change. In fact, I came to believe that it was useful for others because it illustrates how normal attitudes towards ones parents can become totally corrupted by the evil events that I lived through. And that is how the healing process has worked for me--when I have been able to accept what I regard as the worst of my actions, the worst of my attitudes and beliefs, then I begin to heal and to become more and more a part of the human race.

This very book owes its existence to my children, Ruth and Leon, becoming interesting in hearing my story. And then as I talked to more and more teachers and more and more students, my story kept getting more detailed and longer and longer. And finally, I wanted to write it down. And I started doing that about ten years ago.

I obviously do not tell to students all that I have written here. Normally, I spend most of my time on the period from the creation of the ghetto until I arrive safe in England and begin to reconstruct my life. But it was telling this story that led me to explore how these childhood experiences affected and shaped my life as an adult. And so this book with its not so pretty pictures of what I was like for much of my adult life.

And this is what I mean by being healed. It is in the sharing of myself, my pain and my joy, that I become healed. Being in demand, and being wanted by so many schools filled a void in my soul. Many many teachers have accepted me and made feel this sense of belonging and worth that I have always longed for. I consider many of these teachers as my personal warm friends. Speaking to young people with out lecturing them is the biggest blessing in my life. And I have profited much from their questions. They have innocently asked some of the toughest questions I have had to face in my life. I treasure the thirteen year old girl who was troubled because I showed no emotion when I told about the Nazis throwing my infant nephew out the hospital window to his certain death. She forced me to take a much deeper look at myself.

In ten years of speaking in a hundreds schools I have had the fortune to come across many fantastic and wonderful teachers. And I have had the opportunity to receive many responses from students. I will tell you the story of two such teachers and then share with you some of the letters I have received from students.

The two teachers I want to tell you about are Mary Bryant from Cabot, Arkansas and Nancy Sanders from McHenry, Illinois. They embody the qualities of many teachers in the United States and their caring for both their students and others, as what I say about them will show, goes well beyond any conception of "professional duties." What I experienced with them and what I saw their students experience was that they were constantly issuing invitations and challenges to everyone they encountered to become the most noble and caring human beings they could become.

"The Boy Who Refused to Die - Sevek and The Holocaust"
by Sidney Finkel
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