Holocaust survivor speaks to freshman class

Sonia Warshawski addresses the freshman class on March 1.

Sydney Hoover

Sonia Warshawski addresses the freshman class on March 1.

Ninety-one-year-old Holocaust survivor Sonia Warshawski visited De Soto High School on March 1 to speak to the DHS freshman class in a special presentation. Warshawski, who is originally from Poland and is now a tailor in Overland Park, survived time in several concentration camps throughout her late teens, including Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. She was finally liberated around age 19.

English teacher Solitaire Ware organized the presentation to go along with the freshman class’ reading of the book Night by Elie Weisel.

“One of my students, Alex Wright, his sister had interviewed her in the past and she went to go speak to his sister’s class for something. He provided me with her contact information and then I went through her daughter, Regina, who finally accepted my request to have her come speak,” Ware said.

Warshawski shared a multitude of surreal stories about her time in the camps, including her separation from her mother, riding on cattle trains between locations and coming face to face with Dr. Josef Mengele, a Nazi physician known as the ‘angel of death’, as well as vivid descriptions and photographs of Auschwitz and other camps.

“If there is Hell, if you believe in that, I can tell you this was worse than Hell,” Warshawski said during her speech.

Hearing the first person account of the Holocaust made the events seem much more real and gave them a whole new level of emotion and pain, according to Ware and her students.

“I know for me personally, it is one thing to read the words. It is another to hear them from someone’s mouth. It is another thing to put a person directly in front of you that is saying that she experienced the same things that Elie did. It’s more vivid and it’s more real,” Ware said.

Freshman Lauren Mallicoat described the presentation as “unreal. Kind of like a fictional story.” She also added that one of the biggest messages she took away from what Warshawski said was “that hatred is a horrible thing.”

“She experienced all of this, and yet, she’s standing here in front of us. More importantly, she’s constantly saying ‘don’t hate.’ How? How are you that big of a person? How are you that strong? … How do you not hate the people who did all those things to you?” Ware said. “Forgive, don’t ever forget, and try not to hate. Try to replace all of the hate in your world with some element of compassion, some element of love, some element of acceptance of everybody for their differences. Those would probably be the two biggest things that I walked away and I hope students walked away with.”

Warshawski spoke to the ideas of love and forgiveness significantly throughout her speech, and especially emphasized how important it is to spread those ideas to the younger generations.

“I don’t believe in angels flying. I believe when babies are born, they are angels and it is up to their parents to mold them,” Warshawski said. “If you mold them to love, they will love.”