2008 Woodie Awards
Genocide survivors remember past
Wendy Wills / Staff Reporter
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The Pensacola and Fort Walton Beach University of West Florida campuses had the opportunity to hear two genocide survivors speak about their experiences Sept. 15 in a special presentation called "Remembering the Past" at the UWF Music Hall.
Rwandan genocide survivor Eugenie Mukeshimana and Holocaust survivor David Gerwitzman spoke at the event presented by the UWF John C. Pace Jr. Symposium Series. About 100 people attended, and the talk was webcast to the Okaloosa-Walton Community College/UWF Fort Walton Beach campus.
Mukeshimana is a Rwandan Tutsi who survived the 1994 genocide, in which the Hutus killed about 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days. Most of the dead were the Tutsis.
Hard feelings between the Tutsis and the Hutus turned to hatred in April 1994 when the plane of Juvenal Habyarimana, president of Rwanda, was shot down, and the Tutsi population became an instant scapegoat, which provoked the genocide, Mukeshimana said.
She was eight months pregnant at the time of the genocide and eventually lost her husband, uncle and sister to violence.
"We don't know what happened to (my husband) because we haven't managed to get his remains," Mukeshimana said.
She said there are important reasons why she decided to speak at UWF.
"There's not much known about what happened," she said. "I think the impression is not to make people feel sorry for me or anyone else. It's simple things that people can have a great appreciation of life itself."
She said at one time, the Tutsis and the Hutus did not see ethnicity as an issue. But when the Belgians came to the country, they found a nation that was very organized and decided to make a law that said the Tutsis had certain physical characteristics, which defined the two tribes.
Mukeshimana said that when she woke up one morning, she heard news that the Rwandan president was dead, and there were radio broadcasts telling the Hutus to kill their Tutsi neighbors. She said that many Hutus did not care whether individual Tutsis were involved with the killing.
She said she and her family managed to flee to a friend's home, where she hid, and they found another place for her husband to hide.
"I got discovered once," she said, adding that she nearly was captured by police.
She also said she was taken to a place where people were being killed and saw trucks that took the bodies to mass graves.
"You had to pay to be shot," she said. "And they had to be willing to take your body after they shot you."
After the 100 days of genocide, U.N. troops and aid workers arrived to restore relative peace in Rwanda, she said.
David Gewirtzman, one of 16 Jews out of 8,000 in Losice, Poland, who survived after the German invasion, also lived in the shadow of death.
He said that on Sept. 1, 1939, he started his sixth year of school, and his principal told him, "The German army just invaded the country."
"Only seven days after the attack, I looked up at the sky above in my town of Losice," Gewirtzman said. "I noticed three planes flying over the town. Suddenly, I saw bombs falling."
The bombardment buried down a quarter of Losice. He said that synagogues became a military target, and soon he saw Nazis marching through the town. The school he attended soon became a place where the Germans settled.
He said that all Jews had to bow and take off his hat to a German. Women and children were taken to labor camps and never returned.
"I had to put on an armband of the Star of David," Gewirtzman said, "to point out I was not to be associated with."
Gewirtzman recalled a scarring experience in December 1939 when he returned to school. A tall man in a black uniform with a holster on his side asked for the Jewish children. When no one spoke, he slammed the teacher across the face with his gun and kicked him in the stomach. Gewirtzman said he ran out of the room before the man could get to him.
Soon, he and his family were forced to live in the ghettos. Disease spread, hunger increased and "temperatures dropped below freezing," he said. But no warm clothing was issued to him or the rest of the Jews.
In 1944, he went back to the ghetto in Losice. He then smuggled himself through a half-dozen borders into Italy. He eventually came to the United States and became a pharmacist. Now, he travels nationwide with his wife to tell of his experience.
Some of the viewers at the lecture found the speech to be very informative.
"It was great to hear their opinions on hate and going to hear a message rather than just reading about it," said junior Priscilla Hataway, an international tourism and marketing major.
Pensacola resident Mark Pace, 41, said the public learned a great deal from the speakers.
"I was more moved at their conclusion," he said. "These are people who had to make the choice in tragic circumstances not to hate, but to find a different way to react."