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HURLBURT FIELD \u2014 Shortly before her parents were murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, 14-year-old Molly Gross was sent to a labor camp.
\nGross did not know that most of her family was about to become part of an extermination that would claim 6 million Jewish lives. She spent long days in a factory sewing over bullet holes in German uniforms.<\/p>\n
Her supervisor was the daughter of the factory owner, but a good woman. She often hid apples in Gross\u2019 work basket and repaired her shoes in secret when they began to fall apart.<\/p>\n
Seventy years later, Gross\u2019 daughter spoke at Hurlburt Field\u2019s Holocaust Days of Remembrance ceremony.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose small acts gave my mother hope amidst darkness and despair,\u201d Dr. Lori Ripps said Thursday. \u201cSo much of what happened is simply unfathomable. Beyond comprehension \u2026 But there was humanity in the inhumanity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ripps was one of several speakers at the annual event, which focused on the theme of rescue and honored those who risked their lives to fight genocide.<\/p>\n
Ripps\u2019 daughter, Hannah, sang a hauntingly beautiful rendition of \u201cAni Maamin,\u201d which translates from Hebrew as \u201cI Believe.\u201d Many Jews sang the prayer when heading to the gas chambers. It became known as the Hymn of the Camps.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we take time to remember those who preceded us. We\u2019re doing something that\u2019s inherently human,\u201d said Col. Mustafa Koprucu, commander of the 505th Command and Control Wing at Hurlburt.<\/p>\n
Koprucu quoted Edmund Burke\u2019s famous saying: \u201cAll that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Joseph Callewaert lived through World War II and authored \u201cLights Out for Freedom,\u201d stories from Belgium during the Nazi occupation. At the end of his speech he played a silent film that was ordered by the camp commander at Auschwitz. It showed hundreds of Jewish prisoners boarding one of the final trains bound for Auschwitz from a station in Westorbook, Netherlands.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you watch, I want you to take note of a particular image,\u201d Callewaert said. \u201cIt is of a 10-year-old girl whose name we have discovered was Stella.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was a frame of a young girl, dark hair whipping in the wind as the train departed the station. Callewaert said most Jews in the video were calm and casual because they believed they were just being relocated. Stella was unsmiling.<\/p>\n
Of the 1,019 people boarding the train in the film, only 107 would survive the concentration camps. Stella was not one of them.<\/p>\n
Holocaust survivor Estelle Laughlin spoke the opening lines in a video that was shown from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
\u201cMemory is what shapes us. Memory is what teaches us. We must understand: It\u2019s where our redemption is.\u201d<\/p>\n