(light pleasant music)
-: Well thank you everybody.
Thank you for being here tonight.
Well, to Regent Janiece Longoria,
thank you for your very kind words.
As a UT distinguished alumna,
your life and career reflect the core values
of our great university.
And as a UT System regent,
you are working to ensure that more Texas students
than ever before have access to the life-changing
educational opportunities at our universities.
And I thank you for your leadership,
and also for your friendship.
I'd also like to thank Senator Florence Shapiro
for her decades of service representing the people
of her hometown, here in Dallas,
(audience clapping) and her remarkable work
as chair of the Dallas Holocaust Museum.
And leading the effort to create the new Dallas Holocaust
and Human Rights Museum.
And to my friend, John Massey, what can I say?
You have been worked so hard,
you and Lib have worked so hard for supporting
this event for 10 months.
And as always, your commitment and your love
for the University of Texas inspires us all.
One more round of applause
(audience clapping) for John Massey.
And I'd like to thank tonight's dinner chairs,
Dawn and Todd Aaron, Lisa and Neil Goldberg,
Lisa and Steve Lieberman, and Elaine and Trevor Pearlman.
Let's give them all
another round of applause. (audience clapping)
And I'd like to thank all of you who were in that video.
What a fabulous introduction video.
But seriously, photographs from the 1970s should not
be shown in public. (audience laughing)
I also want to say how grateful I am to Mary Pat Higgins.
She came to my office almost a year ago
and invited me to be here and receive this award.
And to everybody at the Dallas Holocaust Museum
for presenting me with this award,
and for asking me to represent the University of Texas
at Austin this evening.
(audience clapping)
And Dallas knows how to turn out a crowd.
Look at this room.
So I'd like to thank every single person here tonight
for supporting the mission of the Dallas Holocaust Museum
and the Center for Education and Tolerance.
This is an incredible institution,
and your engagement and partnership enable it to thrive.
Let's give you all a big round
of applause, thank you. (audience clapping)
So here in Dallas,
we are many miles away from the countryside,
and the cities of Europe where the Holocaust took place.
More than 70 years have passed since the concentration camps
were liberated, and World War II ended.
But the lessons of the Holocaust are not constrained
by geography, or by time.
They are as resonant today as they have ever been.
My father's family was nearly destroyed
during the Holocaust.
But as a kid, I didn't know much about it.
My three siblings and I were raised in a home
filled with drawings on the walls.
Drawings of street scenes, of buildings,
cathedrals, rivers, canals.
And a few portraits.
They were made by my grandmother, Klara Gereb.
Because of her art, I felt, even at a young age,
that I knew Notre Dame and the Arc de Triomphe in Paris,
the Ponte Vecchio in Florence,
and the canals and the lagoon of Venice.
Her art transported me out of my small town,
out of America, across oceans.
I never met my grandmother Klara.
All I had was an ethereal impression
of what she looked like from her portrait.
I had her art.
That was all.
But as I got older,
I learned about her life and gained an understanding
of the depth of her talent and the generosity of her spirit.
Klara lived in Subotica, Yugoslavia,
near the border of Hungary.
She trained as a graphic artist, won prizes for her work,
and spent years traveling, studying,
and drawing throughout Europe in the 1920s.
She was independent and creative,
regarded as far ahead of her time.
Eventually, she returned to Subotica,
married my grandfather Louis,
the editor-in-chief of a widely circulated newspaper, Naplo.
And they had two children,
a daughter, Eszti, and a son, Steven, my dad.
My dad.
Well as you saw in the video,
last year I gave a speech in Houston
about my dad's story of survival during the Holocaust.
And that speech was the first time I told his story
in a public setting.
It's a story of resilience in the face of terror.
A story of bravery in the face of certain death.
A story that is a testament to my father's courage.
It's also a story about our nation.
A nation that fought evil,
liberated my dad and thousands of others,
and gave my family the opportunity
to build a new life in America.
So tonight, I will talk again about my dad's experiences
during the Holocaust.
Why?
Why do I tell his story again?
Why is it important?
When most people think of the Holocaust,
they think of a number.
Six million.
For the six million Jews who were killed.
They don't think of names.
And so, it's difficult to feel empathy or understanding.
Time has a way of numbing us to the pain of the past.
History has a way of condensing human life
into a remote series of dates and events.
Names and stories, however, have none of these shortcomings.
They can be clear, vivid, relatable for all time.
So that's why I tell his story again tonight.
In the 1930s,
the Fenves family was an established,
in Subotica.
They were well-educated, well-respected,
hard-working, and prosperous.
They lived in a beautiful building,
with their apartment located directly above
their newspaper offices.
In April
of 1941,
my father was nine years old,
and his sister Eszti was eleven.
The family's world changed forever.
School was suddenly dismissed in the middle of the day.
My dad returned home to find out
Nazi Germany had declared war on Yugoslavia.
And that Hungary, an ally of Germany,
had crossed the border to reoccupy the province
that included his hometown.
My dad and Eszti heard gunfire nearby
and crowds cheering in celebration.
The family's German governess soon marched out
the front door,
stating she would not spend another night in a Jew's home.
The governess was emboldened by the Hungarian
anti-Semitic laws that had been put into effect
in the occupied territories that very day.
Laws that allowed property owned by Jews to be confiscated,
and regulations to be instituted to humiliate
and harass them.
Laws that soon led to the public hanging
of 11 young Jewish men and women in Subotica.
And Jews were no longer allowed
to employ non-Jewish workers.
So, even though she wanted to stay on with the family,
their cook, the family's cook, Maris, had to leave them.
On the afternoon of the occupation,
my grandfather Louis was led out of his own newspaper
offices by Hungarian military officers.
And as he was taken to the door,
cruel slurs and insults were yelled at him
by the editors and the printing press crew
he had employed for years.
His staff.
For three years,
the Fenves family lived in their apartment,
but under increasingly restrictive and degrading laws.
And they had to sell nearly all
of their personal possessions just to get by.
Then in March of 1944, Nazi Germany occupied Hungary.
Among the Nazis who led the occupation
was SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann,
who proceeded to implement the Final Solution in Hungary.
A week after the German takeover,
four Hungarian plainclothes police
came for my grandfather Louis.
My dad and Eszti went to the window
and saw their father put into a black car.
They didn't know if they would ever see him again.
A few months passed.
Then suddenly, my dad, his mom, and sister were told
that they were to be evicted within 24 hours.
And by the time they were ready to leave the next day,
every inch of their staircase was occupied
by people waiting to ransack their apartment.
Neighbors cursed at them and spat on them
as they walked down the stairs,
leaving the only home my dad had known
for a cramped and filthy ghetto.
June 6th, 1944.
D-Day.
The Allied forces landed on the beach in Normandy,
a thousand miles from Subotica.
That day was also my dad's 13th birthday.
June 6th, 1944.
The year he was supposed to celebrate his bar mitzvah.
But by this time,
the ethnic cleansing of European Jews was nearly complete.
The Hungarian Jews were some of the last remaining.
A few days after D-Day,
my dad learned the Allies were in France,
fighting the Germans on the Western Front.
Would the Allies defeat the Nazis and arrive in time
to save his family?
No, it wouldn't be soon enough.
A few weeks later,
the families in the ghettos were ordered to line up
along the railroad tracks,
facing a long line of boxcars.
They were quickly filled, 50 to 60 people per car,
with two small, barred windows,
and one bucket for sanitation.
As my dad looked back through the closing doors,
he saw the townspeople sneaking into the ghetto,
eager to once again loot any possessions left behind.
The doors were locked and the train started rolling.
After many days without food or water,
people, including friends my dad had grown up with,
died in the boxcar, their bodies pressed against the living.
Finally, the train stopped and the doors opened
with a clang.
They had arrived at Auschwitz.
Somehow, my dad,
Eszti and their mother found each other
amid the chaos of people being herded away from the tracks.
Holding hands, they reached the point where men and women
were being separated.
My dad squeezed his mother's and Eszti's hand,
as the crowd thrust him forward, alone.
It was the last time my dad ever touched
or saw his mother, Klara.
He was sent to the Youth Block in one
of the many compounds within Auschwitz.
The average time a person would survive in Auschwitz
was four days.
My dad would go on to spend five months there.
Over time, my father's friends began to waste away,
victims of a steady regime of starvation and degradation.
They became weak and detached,
turning into shuffling ghosts with glassy eyes
before being carted off to the crematorium.
The Auschwitz compounds were ruled by Kapos,
mostly criminals from German prisons
who worked for the SS to control the other inmates.
They hated the Jewish prisoners and did whatever they could
to torture and intimidate them.
They were more feared than the SS.
Between the terrible conditions and the merciless harassment
by the German Kapos, my dad had little chance of surviving.
But he had a unique skill that would extend his life.
In a ironic twist of fate,
the German governess who had abandoned their family
had taught my dad fluent German.
And based on his ability to speak German and Hungarian,
he was chosen to interpret for the Kapos
and the German civilians who came to Auschwitz
to select slave laborers.
My dad had been in Auschwitz for a month
when the makeup of the Kapos changed drastically.
The vicious German criminals were replaced
by Polish political dissidents,
intellectuals who had been arrested
for their anti-Nazi actions.
This new group of Polish Kapos became the leadership
of the underground movement in the camp,
determined to resist the SS by any means necessary.
In addition to the Hungarian and German,
my dad spoke Serbian, which is similar to Polish,
and the Polish Kapos started using him as an interpreter.
The Polish group's rebellious spirit and commitment
to sabotaging the Nazis deeply inspired my father
and changed the course of his life.
He no longer feared that he would end up another casualty
in the crematorium.
Now, he had hope.
And he had the will to fight back.
He managed to get assigned to the camp's roof repair detail,
which enabled him to pass through
the many compounds of Auschwitz,
doing black market trading as well as
intelligence collection and exchange.
One day, on a visit to a women's compound,
my dad was recognized by the inmates from Subotica,
his hometown.
He heard shouts, Eszti is here.
The cry, Eszti, Eszti, rang out loudly.
He eventually found his sister,
her face drawn, thin as a bone,
her long braids replaced by a short shock of red hair.
Eszti told my dad that their mother Klara had died.
She had been so weakened by the three years of worry
and persecution preceding her deportation
that Klara lasted only a few weeks in the camp.
After this one and only meeting with his sister,
my dad traded all of his black market goods
for a sweater and a shawl for Eszti,
who was scheduled for an outgoing transport,
and paid a courier to take them to her
so she could keep warm during the coming cold winter.
And as the Soviet Army was approaching Auschwitz
in late 1944,
inmates were being selected and killed.
During one selection for the gas chambers,
my dad hid in a latrine trench submerged up to his mouth.
And now with the compound virtually empty,
the Polish underground prepared my dad to escape.
They ran through different scenarios with him
and helped him develop stories and responses
to potential questions he might be asked.
And eventually, an opportunity came,
and the underground slipped my dad into a line of inmates
for an outgoing transport.
And at the end of the line was the tattooing station.
My dad was tattooed on his right arm
with the number he would have for life,
B13874.
Then, he was loaded into a boxcar.
Three days later, the train came to a halt
in the small German town of Niederorschel,
and the inmates lined up.
But a German foreman who he had worked for in the camp
walked right up to my dad,
by far the youngest person in line,
and yelled in an angry voice, "What are you doing here?
"I did not select you when you interpreted
"for me in Auschwitz."
At first, my dad didn't know how to answer.
This wasn't one of the situations
the underground had prepared him for.
But my dad thought quickly, cleared his throat,
looked the man in the eye,
and in the coolest voice he could muster,
said, "Mister foreman, with this many new inmates,
"they thought that you would need
"an additional interpreter."
The foreman, surprised, shook his head,
turned to the SS sergeant, "Not a bad idea, that is."
And he walked away.
My dad became a slave laborer
in a satellite of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
It was filled with Jewish survivors of the death camps
and Soviet prisoners of war.
They worked in 14-hour shifts in a small factory,
manufacturing wings for a Messerschmidt fighter aircraft.
The inmates often risked their lives
to sabotage the planes, cutting cables,
making subtle tears in the aluminum,
and intentionally not tightening the rivets.
They used hand signals to show the painting crew
where the sabotaged components were,
so they could paint over them.
Air raids happened twice a day.
In the morning, the inmates would cheer as a tight formation
of US bombers flew to the east.
In the afternoon,
they watched the American squadrons returning
in missing man formation.
And they cried as they counted the number of empty spaces,
signaling downed US planes.
But as winter turned to spring,
there were fewer and fewer missing planes.
The Americans were winning.
On April 1st, 1945, the factory was evacuated.
My dad and others were forced to march.
They trudged through the farmlands and villages
of Germany for days.
And at one point,
two guards started talking about the victory of the Reich.
My dad yelled at the guards, "You are crazy,"
and one of them viciously slammed my dad
with his rifle butt, breaking his arm.
His fellow inmates quickly made a sling out of
the branches and cloth so he could continue.
As the march dragged on, people were starting to weaken,
and many were shot.
During one stop,
they heard from a member of the local underground
that the Germans were planning to execute everyone
as the US Army approached,
and that they should stall as long as possible.
The next morning, the surviving inmates had a plan.
Two of them hid,
and the SS guards went out to search for them.
As the group waited,
my dad could hear the sounds of artillery fire
in the distance.
After being stalled for eight hours,
the SS sergeants gave up the search
and marched the inmates up a tree-covered hill.
As gunfire and roaring tanks drew nearer,
the SS started shooting more and more inmates.
The group began singing in Polish, in Russian, and Hebrew.
Singing, just to find the strength for one more step.
As they reached the top of the hill,
they could see barbed wire fences and guard towers.
They had arrived at Buchenwald.
My dad was marched to a bunk,
and collapsed from fever and exhaustion.
The next day, the US Army's Sixth Armored Division
reached Buchenwald.
All the SS had fled.
The surviving inmates took control of the command tower,
and raised a white flag.
Now while this was happening, my dad was fast asleep,
exhausted beyond all measure.
But eventually, his friend shook him awake and yelled,
"You idiot, you slept through
"all of the excitement. (audience laughing)
"Now the Americans are arriving."
My dad and his friend raced to the fence,
squeezed themselves in to see the Army tanks,
armored vehicles and trucks rolling down the road.
With his face pressed against the fence,
my dad saw the American soldiers liberating Buchenwald.
The GIs looked at the emaciated inmates
with alarm and disbelief.
And my dad collapsed and lost consciousness.
In total, 21,000 inmates at Buchenwald
were saved by the American.
Now imagine that.
More than a dozen ballrooms just like this,
full of people, saved.
Think of that.
And in the weeks of recovery that followed
in the Army's 120th Evacuation Hospital,
my dad had a choice.
To declare himself a refugee,
or return to Subotica with the hope
of seeing his family again.
He chose to go home.
And when he got there, he found Eszti,
who had survived Bergen-Belsen,
and my grandfather Louis,
who had barely survived as a slave laborer
in a Silesian coal mine.
The guards there had severely beaten him,
kicked his teeth out,
and he was half of his original weight.
Although gravely ill,
my grandfather Louis only thought about his children.
And in December of 1945,
he wrote a letter to a friend living in New York City.
And from my father's translation of that letter,
I quote Louis.
"I was deported for sixteen months.
"I went through endless suffering, humiliation, and illness.
"We had escaped from a hell that man's mind could invent,
"but the horrors of which no pen,
"no word can even approximately convey."
Louis wrote that his children were the only ones
for whom I live and carry on and suffer.
And he closed the letter with a request.
"Finally, I ask you to let me know whether you could send
"affidavits, first to my children, and if possible, to me.
"My only hope is that the children will be able to get out.
"It would be a great pain to be separated from them again,
"but I would have to do it for the sake of their future.
"I see no other way out, I repeat, I am not important,
"I only want to send my children out,
"and would only go if their emigration were settled."
Louis Fenves died five weeks after writing that letter.
A few months after my grandfather's death,
Winston Churchill gave his famous speech
in Fulton, Missouri.
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,
"an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."
The Fenves survivors were now behind that Iron Curtain.
My dad, his sister Eszti, and their two cousins
set out to escape communist Yugoslavia.
Using exit documents my dad forged
for the train journey to Italy,
he and his sister crossed the border at Trieste,
the Trieste of Churchill's speech.
My dad tells the story of the train arriving
at Milano Centrale,
that enormous fascist-era edifice in the middle of Milan.
He disembarked from the train.
He walked out of that station and sat on the steps,
savoring his first taste of freedom.
More than fifty years later, my wife Carmel,
my daughters and I spent time at a university near Milan.
I have passed through Milano Centrale many times.
And each time I walk out of that train station
and down those very steps, it has reminded me of my father,
surviving fascism and escaping communism.
To me, those steps symbolize freedom.
The freedom he earned for himself, and for me,
and for my family.
During a trip to Paris in 2001,
my family and I met up with my dad.
I had grown up with the idea of Paris
that had been refracted through my grandmother's eyes.
And during this trip,
we could see the places she had drawn
with my dad as our tour guide.
We stood outside the apartment where he lived
as a refugee in a once-rundown neighborhood
near the Sorbonne on the Left Bank.
We ate at a French country restaurant by the Odeon-Theatre,
where back in his day, you could eat for just a few francs.
Well, decades later, the bill was in euro,
and it was a little bit more expensive.
My dad told us how he and Eszti waited and waited in Paris
while he completed French high school,
until
finally receiving the US immigration visas
that his father had dreamed of.
He told stories about how he arrived in Chicago
in 1950 at age 19.
Then, how he was drafted into the United States Army
to serve his new country as part of
the Allied Occupation Forces in Germany,
only seven years after being liberated by the same Army.
He went to college on the GI Bill,
became a US citizen, married my mother Norma,
and together raised a family of four children,
and became a renowned engineering professor.
We were sitting in a restaurant with him
in an area where he once waited patiently
for his chance at the American Dream.
And on this day,
my dad was reflecting on how that dream had come true.
We were in Europe.
The Europe I had learned about
from the drawings of my grandmother, Klara.
Today, Klara's art represents many things to me.
There is her talent and spirit,
which I got to see displayed every day as a boy.
There is the tragedy of the Holocaust,
which took her from this Earth far too soon.
But there's something else.
The bravery of an individual who could have stood by
and done nothing.
Who could have turned her back on the Fenves family,
but didn't.
Let me explain.
Remember that painful scene I described
on the day the Fenveses were marched down their stairs
and out of their home?
The insults, the curses, the looting?
Well in that crowd, among the thieves and rioters,
was someone else.
Maris, the family's former cook.
She had a different plan.
Maris stormed into the deserted home alongside the looters
and grabbed Klara's cookbook along with as much of her
art as she could carry, stuffing it all into binders.
And 20 years after the war,
when my dad and Eszti were settled in America,
Maris returned over 250 pieces of Klara's art to the family.
And that's why we still have it today.
Because of the bravery of one person.
One person who stood up and fought for what she believed
and knew to be right.
In the face of long-standing hate,
sanctioned and powered by the state
and by its national leaders,
Maris had the humanity to care,
and most importantly, the courage to act.
And that's the idea I want to leave with you tonight.
The idea that though evil and hatred define the Holocaust,
there was, and always will be, a choice for people to make.
A choice to do good.
A choice to resist.
A choice to stand up for those who are oppressed.
A choice to fight back.
In my dad's story, there were the SS, who hanged young boys
and killed innocent people by the millions.
There were neighbors who,
at the slightest whiff of opportunity,
stole from, exploited, and degraded their Jewish countrymen.
And there were the leaders who conspired to commit genocide
and wipe out an entire people.
But also in my dad's story,
there were members of the underground in the camps.
There were the slave laborers, who sabotaged German planes.
There were American soldiers,
who poured across borders to conquer evil
and save the lives of people whom they did not know,
but needed their help.
And then there was my dad.
A boy, a boy who traded everything he had in the death camp
for warm clothes for his sister.
Who sabotaged planes, who survived the death camps
to create a family of his own to bring his father's dream
of freedom in America to life.
There is always a choice.
And when we listen to the stories of the survivors
and visit institutions like the Dallas Holocaust Museum,
we gain the knowledge necessary to make the right ones.
My mother is here tonight, along with my two sisters,
my cousin, who is a daughter of my Aunt Eszti,
several grandchildren of my dad and Eszti,
and my dad is here with us as well.
So now, I'd like to call up
my father Steven Fenves (audience clapping)
and my mother Norma to be recognized, thank you.
("Height of Achievement" by Paul Reeves)
-: That was spectacular.
(light pleasant music)
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