HILLSBORO, OR – “I’m tormented by memories even as I try to carry on with my life. I’m crying in silence,” 92-year-old Alter Wiener told members of the Oregon state senate’s education committee this past September.
“The horrific memories of the Holocaust are still fresh, the ashes from which I rose are still smoldering.”
Wiener, a Hillsboro resident for the past 18 years, was speaking in support of a bill requiring students to be taught about the Holocaust and genocide. On Tuesday evening, as he crossed Northeast Century Boulevard, Alter was struck and killed by a car.
Get all the latest information on what’s happening in your community by signing up for Patch’s newsletters and breaking news alerts
Hillsboro Police say that the crash happened just before 5 p.m.. Wiener, who was wearing dark clothes, was not walking in the crosswalk when a southbound Honda Accord struck him.
Wiener was rushed to the hospital where he died.
The driver of the Accord stayed at the scene and cooperated. Police say that he will not be charged in connection with the incident.
HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR
Wiener was 13-years-old on September 11, 1939 when his father was killed by Germany soldiers who had invaded Poland. Two years later, he would be deported to Blechhammer, a forced labor camp.
It was the first of five camps in which he would spend World War 2, camps he would say, in which he awoke every day not knowing if that was the day that he would be killed.
On May 9, 1945, Wiener was among those liberated by the Russian Army. He weighed 80 pounds at the time. Wiener was one of only two members of his extended family to survive the Holocaust.
It was an experience that he carried with him through the years.
“I might appear to be a normal person, but I absolutely am not,” he told the senate committee. “I’m tortured by nightmares.
“Not all scars can be healed by the passage of years.”
It was that fact that kept Wiener determined to share his story with the generations that followed him, to keep the story of the genocide alive.
He wrote a book – 64735: FROM A NAME TO A NUMBER – A Holocaust Survivor’s Autobiography – and spent many years addressing almost any audience that would listen.
He spoke with nearly 900 groups, giving talks at high schools, middle schools, colleges, universities, synagogues, and churches. He spoke to prisoners in jails and gave scores of interviews.
Wiener didn’t want the story of what happened to be lost, he didn’t want what happened to be repeated.
“Across the country, students who are graduating from high schools are now twice as likely as a generation ago to not be able to identify the Holocaust or another genocidal incident,” he said in September.
Click Here: camiseta rosario central
“We are losing our history.”
That was why he was in Salem in September, trying to convince legislators to make Oregon the 11th state to mandate the teaching of genocide, trying to stress the obligation to “divert the rivers of hatred so that another Holocaust will never happen again..
“Learning about the Holocaust is not just a chapter in recent history, but a divine lesson on how to be more tolerant, more loving, and that hatred is eventually self-destructive.
“Be better rather than bitter.”
Photos via Alter Wiener/Video via Hillsboro Library.