German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier bestowed his country’s highest civilian honor last month on two Holocaust survivors for their commitment to sustaining the memory of the horrors that Nazis inflicted on millions of Jews, and for opposing anti-Semitism, right-wing extremism and racism.
Steinmeier awarded the Order of Merit in December 2020 to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and Henrietta Kretz. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was unable to confer the medals in person, but sent hand-written notes to the two survivors in which he paid tribute to their lifelong dedication to keeping alive the historical memory of one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century.
Now 95 years old, Lasker-Wallfisch was imprisoned for 10 months in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp. She survived only because the Nazis needed a cellist for their women’s orchestra, which played marches for the camp’s inmates as well as concerts for the Schutzstaffel (SS).
On Holocaust Day of Remembrance in 2018, Lasker-Wallfisch was invited to address the German parliament and members of the government. “There are no excuses and no explanations for what happened all those years ago,” she said. “All that remains is hope: the hope that ultimately, one day, reason will prevail.”
At a ceremony in September 2019, when President Steinmeier presented the German National Prize to Lasker-Wallfisch, he said that the prize “pays tribute to services to our country. Mrs. Lasker-Wallfisch, your endeavors to foster understanding, particularly with young Germans, your stance against anti-Semitism and marginalization, and your support for tolerance are shining examples of such services.”
Henriette Kretz, born in 1934, grew up in a Jewish family in the Polish town of Sambór that is now part of the Ukraine. In 1941 the family was moved to the ghetto. They escaped deportation several times. Hidden by a Polish-Ukrainian family for over half a year, the Gestapo discovered them. Her parents were shot. Henriette was able to escape and survived in an orphanage run by nuns.
Today, Kretz, 86, lives in Antwerp. A member of the Polish association “Children of the Holocaust,” she still travels to schools across Europe to tell her story to ensure that the past is never forgotten.
The testimonies of Lasker-Wallfisch and Kretz are preserved in the Visual History Archive of the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation. Founded by filmmaker Steven Spielberg, the Foundation houses an archive of 55,000 testimonies of genocides from 65 countries in 43 languages. The archive covers everything from the Holocaust and the Cambodian Genocide to the Armenian Genocide during World War I and the Nanjing Massacre in China shortly before World War II.
“In classrooms around the world, generations of students learn about Anita and Henrietta’s experiences during the Holocaust and this, in turn, promotes hope, tolerance and the denunciation of hatred,” Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith said in a news statement. “They have devoted their lives to education impact, making this a well-deserved honor.”
In 2015, Lasker-Wallfisch participated in the Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony project, which contains biographies and pre-recorded video interviews with eyewitnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides. Replete with advanced filming techniques and cutting-edge display technologies, the pioneering, interactive project enables people to receive real-time responses to their questions, based on a mountain of audiovisual data geared toward conversational interactions and the furthering of knowledge.
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