Scholar talks on 'remembering'

Of the 3,500 inhabitants of Yaffa Eliach's small hometown of Eishyshok, Poland, only 36 survived the Holocaust. But "Restoring A Vanished Past," Eliach's speech last Thursday night in Steinberg-Dietrich Hall, was not about a town of victims. Eliach, a professor of history and literature in the Department of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College and the designer of the Tower of Life exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., does not want her town or her people remembered that way. Instead, Eliach spoke of the way of life people led in the town before the onset of the Holocaust. She created the exhibit as a testament to the lives, rather than a memorial, of the residents of Eishyshok. "I wanted to restore the vanished past and represent victims as real human beings," Eliach said. She added that by emphasizing the fact that the Holocaust happened to ordinary human beings, people may realize it can happen to anyone and do what they can to prevent such injustice. After being appointed in 1979 to President Jimmy Carter's Holocaust Commission, Eliach returned that same year to Eastern Europe for the first time since her illegal escape in 1945. With other members of Carter's commission, Eliach's task was to decide what kind of Holocaust museum should be erected in the U.S. capital. When her colleagues decided that the museum should show visitors the death and destruction that occurred during the Holocaust, Eliach realized that a testament to Jewish life should also be built. The town she was born in would provide the model for that life. Eliach began searching through diaries and collecting old photographs. Her collection has now grown to 10,000 photos depicting the townspeople. In fact, 98 percent of the people who once lived in Eishyshok are accounted for in her studies. "I found photos of weddings, of people swimming and skating -- a town of normal people emerged," Eliach said. Those photos now compose the Tower of Life Exhibit in the Holocaust Museum. The idea for the exhibit to display all of the photos came to Eliach as she stood in 1986 at the mass grave of her family and townspeople. "As I stood there, I did not see the piles of bones that lay in that grave -- I saw faces," Eliach recalled. That was when she realized she wanted everyone to see faces when remembering the Holocaust, and not just death and destruction. And clearly Eliach's unique philosophy has not gone unnoticed. She was voted CBS-TV's Woman of the Year in 1995 and has also written two books. Her most recent book, entitled There Once Was a World, and also based on the people of Eishyshok, Poland, was nominated for the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Students, too, seem to have been moved by Eliach's words. "Dr. Eliach's words inspired us and informed us and will hopefully prevent something like the Holocaust from happening again," College sophomore Seth Kleinman said.