William & Rosalie: A Holocaust Testimony

Preface

v PREFACE BY CRAIG HANLEY In a roundabout way this book began a year before I met William and Rosalie Schiff. In the summer of 2004, I was watching the news on CSPAN. The main story involved Israel and viewers, as usual, were encouraged to phone in their thoughts. Fans of this particular program are accustomed to the occasional caller who cannot control his or her political passion, but the flood of hostility that morning was so steady and intense the host seemed shocked by the suddenly dark tone of his show. There were denunciations of “the Jewish mafia” in the United States and claims that the Jewish state was responsible for 9/11 and for the death of American soldiers in Iraq. There was a demand for the White House to sever ties with its closest ally in the Middle East. Callers with a variety of regional accents were cautioned for their remarks and the more furious had to be disconnected. It was a surprisingly ugly morning in America. To get some background on the issues, I offered to volunteer a few days a week at the Houston Chapter of the American Jewish Committee. The executive director was tremendously hospitable and let me pitch in on minor chores. I watched the organization respond to the media firestorm created by Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and review recent legislation designed to protect places of worship from terror attacks. It was news to me as a Christian that a long established American minority had to maintain these sorts of proactive public relations and defense strategies. WRStxt.indd฀฀฀5 5/9/07฀฀฀10:16:38฀AM vi Preface Out of the blue, a friend in Dallas called and said a client of hers was looking for someone to write a book about his parents . She said, “They’re Holocaust survivors who teach people about the dangers of hate.” The project sounded remarkably in line with my recent interests and I met with Michael Schiff, one of the driving forces behind the Dallas Holocaust Museum . Due in large part to the experiences of his family, Mike has a serious interest in mass hate as a social phenomenon. He did not want this book to be a relentless tale of misery , and fortunately his parents have lived their lives in a way that offers a strong message of hope. They have also lived long enough to connect the Nazi genocide directly to our modern age of suicide bombers and burning towers. At eighty-eight and eighty-four, respectively, William and Rosalie Schiff are still waging a personal educational crusade that has deeply touched thousands of students and adults in North Texas. During months of interviews, I got to know two people whose young lives in Poland were just as normal as ours before the current terror war began. Their biographies are parables we would be foolish to ignore, and their courageous response to the hardships they suffered is a lesson in how much good a single human being—or two—can accomplish in a relatively short period of time. This is not a sentimental book, but many tears had to be shed and re-shed to make sure we got the facts straight. Day after day, the Schiffs went back sixty-five years in time to relive the loss of their families and their entrapment in the Krakow ghetto and subsequent journey through six different Nazi camps. While those events form the bulk of the narrative , in a real sense the story begins at the end, in the normal WRStxt.indd฀฀฀6 5/9/07฀฀฀10:16:38฀AM Preface vii American city where they continue their low-key and highly effective teaching. I believe William is right when he describes this book as a love story. It contains plenty of the horrors that modern civilizations are capable of when, as Rosalie likes to say, “human beings take off their masks.” But after all the torture, the moral belongs to the survivors. The Schiffs tell it quickly and unpretentiously, and offer some timely advice on how to deal with mass hate, an evil that plagues the world now more than ever. The story is built around personal recollections in normalized English. Longer first-person passages, from William or Rosalie or others, are inset and set in a slightly different typeface. WRStxt.indd฀฀฀7 5/9/07฀฀฀10:16:38...