We like to make up all kinds of myths about such people. In fantasies originating in comic books, such people are typically dressed in really fancy outfits and given scientifically improbable powers. They are called “superheroes”. In real life, however, such extraordinary heroics takes a very different form – with no science-defying abilities and rarely any flashy costumes, but with extraordinary levels of dedication. Driven by their pain, these people are powerful forces of good in a world that desperately needs them.
Among these people was the Hebrew School instructor who prepared me for my B’ney Mitzvah, Mira Ryczke Kimmelman. As she taught her Hebrew School class, on days on which her clothing exposed her forearm, we could see a mark that she bore as a reminder of her painful past – a tattoo with the number A-15774. We all knew what this was – a branding that she had received upon entering Auschwitz.
Ms. Kimmelman had survived one of the greatest atrocities of all human history, the World War II Holocaust, which claimed the lives of six-million of the Jewish people, most of them suffering rather gruesome deaths. Even those, such as her, who survived experienced horrors beyond what most people can imagine.
Over the course of the war, she was in multiple concentration camps and was separated from her entire family. After the war, she attempted to reunite with her family, only to find that she and her father were the only two survivors. She herself had barely evaded death a number of times, often by sheer luck.
Many who had survived the Holocaust would not speak of it, as even speaking about their harrowing experiences was too painful. She, however, felt it was her duty to do so, as educating people about that dark period of history was essential to her effort to prevent such a thing from happening again. But she did more than just speak of her harrowing experiences. She also stressed the importance of avoiding the kind of mentality that caused people to commit such atrocities. She was one of those who instilled in me the conviction that it is never okay to dehumanize another human being, no matter how tempting it might be – a lesson which I wish that more people present in today’s day and age had learned as children.
It was last night that I received news of Ms. Kimmelman’s death. Nobody lives forever, but it is especially painful that she died at a time that in which current events show just how forgetful society is of lessons so painfully learned. Yet even at these dark times, there is still hope – hope that we as an American society can avoid the mistake that Germany made in World War II, even as we veer dangerously close to doing exactly that. Not that the United States has always avoided committing its own acts of genocide in the past, nor always avoided other crimes against humanity.
But there is hope that we in today’s modern day and age can avoid yet another repeat of the worst behavior that human nature can offer – and it is the work of people like her that make that possible. Ms. Kimmelman herself is no more – but her contributions to society will outlast her by quite a while.
