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Holocaust survivor wants to stop other genocides

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  • Holocaust survivor wants to stop other genocides

    The News-Sentinel
    Distributed by Knight/Ridder Tribune News Service
    April 17, 2006 Monday

    Holocaust survivor wants to stop other genocides

    by Erika Nordblom, The News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne, Ind.


    Apr. 17--Philip Bialowitz was just 16 when he narrowly escaped death
    at the hands of the Nazis. Unlike his father, mother and millions of
    other Polish citizens, he survived to tell the story of the Nazis and
    their campaign of ethnic cleansing.

    An estimated 250,000 Jews were murdered at Sobibor, a prison camp in
    Poland.

    In 1943, Bialowitz was part of a successful uprising in which six
    hundred prisoners fled. Many were killed during the escape, while
    others made it to the forest surrounding the camp. Bialowitz was one
    of only 48 who survived to see the end of the war that following
    year.

    He will be in Fort Wayne through April 20 and is scheduled to appear
    at 7 tonight at Congregation Achduth Vesholom, 5200 Old Mill Rd. His
    speech is part of the annual Yom Hashoah (Holocaust remembrance)
    observance of the Fort Wayne Jewish Federation.

    The service is free and open to the public. Bialowitz will also speak
    at area schools, including Indiana University-Purdue University Fort
    Wayne.

    By telling his story, Bialowitz hopes to bring attention to the fact
    that the Holocaust was not an isolated incident.

    "The systematic murder of innocent human beings continues, even in
    the 21st century," he says, "My survival means very little if
    Hitler's legacy of genocide lives on."

    Bialowitz points to the mass killings in the Darfur region of western
    Sudan as a recent example of genocide.

    "Four-hundred thousand human beings have been murdered only because
    of their race," he says of the conflict in Africa.

    When Bialowitz remembers the people who suffered at Sobibor, he
    thinks of groups like the people in Darfur, who continue to suffer
    today.

    "Sobibor stands forever as a warning of what happens when we allow
    barbarism to grow out of control," he says.

    Bialowitz says his story is a warning to future generations about the
    danger of letting evil prevail.

    "We cannot allow our world's leaders to continue to abandon our
    fellow human beings in the same way that they abandoned the
    Armenians, the Jews, the Chinese, the Cambodians, the Rwandans, the
    Bosnians, and now the Darfurians," he says, "Sobibor must stand,
    today and throughout the ages, as a reminder of the power we all have
    within us to save our lives and the lives of our fellow human
    beings."

    HEAR HIM: Philip Bialowitz will speak at noon tomorrow in Kettler
    Hall (Room G32) on the IPFW campus, 2101 E. Coliseum Blvd. This event
    is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the
    IPFW Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs at 481-6608.
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