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Holocaust survivor shares story

Magda Brown, a survivor of the Holocaust, talks with students Tues- day after her presentation titled "Think Before You Hate". Photo by Lisa Stemmons.
Magda Brown, a survivor of the Holocaust, talks with students Tues-
day after her presentation titled “Think Before You Hate”. Photo by Lisa Stemmons.

Students were urged to “think before they hate” at an event on Tuesday night.

Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor Magda Brown gave a speech in the Peplow Pavilion of the Hayden-Clark Alumni Center. The presentation was titled “Think Before You Hate” and was sponsored by Bradley’s Intellectual and Cultural Activities Committee (ICAC).

Jewish, non-Jewish students and faculty alike filled the pavilion to the brim for Brown’s speech. Brown commented on the high attendance, with audience members filling the chairs and packed in on the floor to hear her story.

“If anybody asks me, I open up my mouth,” Brown said. “You realize that a lot of people care. If the interest wasn’t here, then none of us would be speaking.”

Brown was born in 1927, and Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944 when she was 17. She outlined the beginning of her story in which her family suffered under the Nuremberg laws, moved to the Jewish ghetto and left their home in railroad cars.

“She was cramped into a boxcar, and she had to stand for three days with no water,” sophomore civil engineering major Brendan Ahern said. “Going a day without water is painful, and then going three days is even worse. I was very surprised that they had to go through that.”

After entering the concentration camp, Brown was separated from her family. Nazi officials shaved her head, took her clothes and robbed her of her identity. Brown said she never saw her family again.

Brown described many tragedies from her time in the Holocaust, including standing for hours in the heat to be counted and working in a factory around poisonous material without protection. When it came time to walk to a different town, she and her friends made a plan to escape to a barn during the night.

“When she decided to crawl through on the ground to the barn, that part really stuck with me because I thought of all the times where it’s much easier to just give up,” sophomore computer information systems major Clayton Fyfe said. “History happens all the time and we are blessed to have someone who went through something we can never experience.”

United States soldiers liberated Brown the morning after she escaped the death march, and she eventually met with a Jewish chaplain to find her relatives in America. She said she was fortunate to be welcomed by her uncles in Chicago and to marry a Jewish man from the same city.

“You are liberated, and you realize you’re an orphan,” Brown said. “You haven’t got a country to go to, you haven’t got a penny to your name, you haven’t got a profession and you’re not even 18 years old.”

Brown ended up working for a Hungarian-Jewish doctor for 40 years and continues to share her story at the Illinois Holocaust Museum.

She left the audience with these three points: protect your freedom as much as you can, think seriously before you hate and be aware that there are characters who say the Holocaust never happened.

“Out of all the bad things come good things,” Brown said. “From slavery to freedom is a very special unit in life. You have to have faith, courage, determination and the most important thing you have to have is volunteers and mentors.”

The event also received support from Jewish-student group Hillel, the Department of History and Chabad. Jewish students had the opportunity to attend a private lunch with Brown at the Chabad house prior to her evening speech.

“It was really nice, intimate, with very few people there where we could actually ask questions and talk to her and hear her stories firsthand,” freshman elementary education major Kyla Gersten said. “But I think it’s important for everyone, not just Jewish students, to come and hear her story because [the survivors are] all going to be gone soon, and we’re only going to be able to hear from second-hand testimony.”

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