German language

How to pronounce gas chamber in German?

Full Transcript

i would like to introduce people to you today
i don't
want to talk as much as me but actually
about people i have met
and actually i would also
like to show you to them
because that is siegmund siegmund is a
contemporary witness and when i met him he
was 89 years old as i met him for the first
time was incredibly excited
because he was almost 90 years old
he always said that sounds better than 89
and i think he's right 90 that's
a pretty old age between
sigmund and me there was a 64 year
age difference and still we can i
say
siegmund was my friend he was a
funny open proud and very
well read smart old man
i learned an incredible amount from him in
between he called me
weekly to ask if i was
diligent if i was learning enough and how
my relationship status education was for
him the highest good and of course
education is also important for me but the
privilege of learning that was still a thing for him
ntimes important from a completely different point of view
than for me because
siegmund had to go to school secretly
when he was young he had to smuggle textbooks and exercise books into
school
he attended a secret class because
you suddenly see he was a jew
he was born in 1924 near
mosques auschwitz in poland after
the german wehrmacht invaded
his city he lives in a ghetto with
his family his daily routine was
surrounded by forbidden by pursuit of
death and suffering
already as a 17 year old young man he
decided to join the resistance
a decision that meant that he
had to leave his family behind in the ghetto a decision that meant that
he said goodbye forever to
his mother his sisters his
brother-in-law and his nieces and nephews
all these people died were
killed never saw them
again underground it happened that
his acquaintances ambushed
w urden and died and so
Siegmund and his friends decided together with his friends
that he didn’t want to die for this cause
and they went on a
long flight they fled for a year
they got
fake papers and traveled
all over Europe their everyday life was characterized
by fear, deprivation and by
the whole thing was very dramatic,
but sigmund was freed by this flight when he arrived
in istanbul in 1944,
that means a year before the end of the war
after the end of the war she
started to lead a very good life
he has lived in many european
countries lived and lived in the usa he found
his great love which he
could hardly talk about because she had died first of all
and he had two wonderful
children and many grandchildren siegmund told all that
i met him
and i was allowed to immerse myself in his life story
my girlfriend and i interviewed him many
hours we got from all this
heard when he talked about his friends
we laughed when he
talked about his family we meant
an 89 year old man sat in front of
me crying because he lost 35 people from his
family that hurt me a
lot that hurt me
we have his feelings shared
we heard his wisdom and we became
friends
we not only
heard his life story we also
drank wine we
ate together we laughed together
we sometimes gossip about the roommates in
his retirement home and very
often very often she talked about it that
he wants to start a revolt in the retirement
home because the food was really
bad, in his opinion
, the time when I was seven was
incredibly moving for me
, i learned a lot for myself and i learned a lot for my
job,
so it was an extremely worse
moment than that
called the minister from his retirement home and told me that
she was doing well at St heir lies for me it
was like a blow because i didn't
expect it
i was allowed to speak at his coffin and
say goodbye to him
i was at his funeral and at that
moment i also felt motivation and courage
i knew that siegmund was responsible for
what i was doing he was just as passionate about my idea
as i was he absolutely loved
it he kept persuading all his acquaintances
to help us sometimes
called and says katharina i
told someone from the nursing home again to
give 50 euros they all have enough money
or he asks katharina why can't the
mayor actually
help you i think i'll call him
so he was very motivated when i needed a
break from my voluntary work back then
he said i'm 90 you don't
why are you taking a break
he was incredibly important for me and
it was very important to him that his
story didn't die and
i took over this wish
his death gave me s shown the time
witnesses really die time is finite
and that shook me up again
to work faster
i want to make siegmund proud and
above all because he
showed me something that no one
else has ever shown more that you can do it
a heck of a lot glasses a mountain of
glasses that lies in auschwitz a mountain
that stands for the fact that millions of people
died
there are glasses of millions of killed
women men and children six
million killed jews many
millions of other dead and everything
we see and what we are getting higher and higher
about the media i could never
understand that at school i saw this
picture of the pile of corpses in the
media they talk about these six
million and i didn't understand what it
meant that never
really touched me
but when i got to know them i did
understood then i understood what is
behind the mountain with the glasses
namely a person behind r this
unimaginable number of dead are
individual fates and to
understand that hurt a lot but that was
also the only way i
could understand and learn the whole thing before
at school i didn’t understand the whole thing
the raised index finger of
my teachers didn’t get me really
moved but hearing siegmund and enjoying his stories that
moved me you can no longer speak it you can see
it died on 19 04 20 116
since then i've been telling his story i
wish that young people
like me back then have the same chance
to understand and to feel like me i
want you to do something and
that's why i'm siegmund's two witnesses
the whole thing is my vocation it
might also be noticed
it's also my job i work
for Heimat hiv i'm the managing director there at the moment
that means i run an association who has set
himself the task of reaching young
people of all
levels of education
to tell stories about holocaust survivors and
to work against racism
we go to school classes from class 4 onwards
that means we go to elementary schools and
you might be asking yourselves how do you
tell elementary school children how can you tell children exactly what I was just talking about
that's exactly what i asked myself and
then 2011 was a
special year for me because i
never met him that year either and erna spoke
in a seminar i
was still studying at the time and my lecturer
invited her as an auschwitz survivor to
tell about elementary school children as a student I was only a
spectator and was supposed to observe
tells her life story he she
told about auschwitz about death and about
light about the loss of her mother and i
was quite speechless and touched the
children listened spellbound and in
the end didn’t ask any questions at all
convened question and answer session and while I was
still sitting there and I asked what should
you ask a woman of
course puts the children's fingers up
because children love to ask
questions and a boy below
answered and asked what gas chambers are
that was a terrible moment for me
I was totally touched and
embarrassed touched i found the question
uncomfortable i thought this poor
woman lost her mother in a gas chamber
how can he ask
that that was my taboo i felt
that it is but not taboo for erna i
realized when she simply
answered she did simply explained
what a gas chamber is the boy
nodded understood and it was over
there were no tears and no unrest
it was just me and it was precisely this
taboo that touched me very much and moved
me from then on it was clear to me that elementary school students would also
understand the story
can
the taboo that we started there that
was only understood in the adult elementary school students
and elementary school students have questions about the
whole thing e my
girlfriend and I have written our master’s theses
on the subject and have worked on some things to substantiate this
. cannot summarize
our results than the
taboo lives in us, the children
already know about everything, the children have it
from the media
and actually it is our task to
know to arrange with the silence that
we always feel about the elementary school
and about this topic we only do it
for mystical ones as it is
already the naturalness with which the
children approach it we take it
away and i want to change that that's
why i am two witnesses that's why
i work in schools and talk to
children about the story because
whenever i talk
i notice that the children don't
slip into a taboo but the children
ask themselves what can i do with it
the children develop a desire to do something to
get involved
because when the children hear
about erna being teased by other children in the schoolyard
w because she was
jewish then you find that unfair you
feel stomp on yourself and you
are angry you ask why and i
really didn't know him to explain
when i tell you that sigmund was hiding in
vienna and feared for his life
and that a cleaning lady with
a small gesture helped you understand
that as children you can already
help people in need with small gestures
for you is exclusion wants religion
skin color and behavior is commonplace
and yet you like is not only
they reject the fact that erna was not
allowed to study medicine because of the anti-
jewish laws they banned
that they find it mean and wrong and
actually it was exactly that
i experience children and young people
who, by talking about the
stories, come to talk about their
own experiences of exclusion
11-year-old children tell me what it's like
to be bullied a girl
once said in class that the other children
tease me because I'm too small am and
then the whole class had
a conversation
hugged together and decided to
apologize
a young muslim from afghanistan
once said you can’t
imagine what it’s like to live as a muslim in
germany society
regularly excludes me and that
led to a heated discussion in
the class how to
change that
i notice every day that these
stories help
to talk about my own experiences and it
helps me to understand it personally and
that's why i work as two witnesses and
that's why i wish that more and more
people understand what is behind the mountain
of glasses
i wish that exactly
what elie wiesel himself
once said a survivor said happens everyone who
listens to a contemporary witness today will become a witness themselves
but time is dying witnesses and
that's why i'm not two witnesses only
i am that we are a big club
we have a lot e volunteers and our
wish is that every person in
Germany can become a witness. that's
why i'm telling the children
and that's why i tell these
stories and take the children with me
into everyday life and what the
survivors have experienced, that's
why i tell them how it happened was
that sigmund had to go to the ghetto so
i'll tell you about how it was for erna wein
auschwitz because it's not just
life stories that the children hear
but also experiences and
through this they understand that memories are
not just passive historical knowledge
but they understand that memory is
also courage can give courage today and
courage to move something when i tell you about
the fact that sigmund and erna
managed to resist in their situation
then that should encourage us to ask
why don't i do something
when i tell about it the segment in the
ghetto home not was able to go to school
and thus managed to
resist what can we vouch for today
when i tell you that erna in the labor camp on
her twentieth
birthday resisted pulling the roller,
refused to do her work
and secretly ran away
just to be able to decide for herself just once besides her birthday
what can we
vouch for if i tell
me that after auschwitz and ravensbrück he
managed to build a life,
start a family and then
forgive what are we for
and that's why i present the
life stories of erna and siegmund
not only make me sad my sympathy
encourages me to continue
and my sympathy spurs me on to do something
they remind me every day that i
cannot accept that right-
wing ideas are represented in the federal parliament
and that I want to work against it
and for me that is a task
maybe today that i would also
wish for after i not only before
children but also from the grow
nds and took you with me
to tell a small excerpt
maybe you also feel
an assignment maybe you have something
in your life that you wanted to change
maybe you have something in
society that you wanted to change
and that's exactly what i would give you to
do it simply
angela merkel understood that
she knows our club she knows
our idea and she might like it here
too and this is a
letter from sela seele a siegmund
wrote and i can read a small
excerpt dear siegmund i have
a life story there heard and was
immediately touched what happened here
is really terrible and i
admire you for what you
have done you are very courageous and
it's nice that there are people like that
and then she wrote in a
heart like orlowski and she can do that
not only support
thanks
[applause]