ALLENDALE, Mich. — Across the world, Jewish communities are commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This year, the day marks 79-years since the Allies liberated the infamous concentration and extermination camps: KZ Auschwitz-Birkenau.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazis and their collaborators across Europe killed 6 million Jews over the course of 12 years, representing two-thirds of the continent’s Jewish population.
Today, fewer than 245,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust are alive. To preserve survivors’ accounts of the deadliest genocide in world history, historians work to compile their experiences into projects such as the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, as well as local researchers at the West Michigan Holocaust Memorial.
Fox 17 spoke with Professor Rob Franciosi from Grand Valley State University on his contributions to the local project, as well as how the project looks to grow in the future.
The West Michigan Holocaust Memorial was launched alongside Ways to Say Goodbye, a 20-foot sculpture found in Frederik Meijer Gardens which commemorates Kristallnacht: one of the first pogroms committed by the Nazis against Jews during the early days of the Third Reich.
You can read our coverage of the memorial here.
The West Michigan Holocaust Memorial has been a continuous project since 2020, looking to document the lives of survivors who settled here in West Michigan. The interactive website allows visitors to step through every stage of a survivor’s life; before, during, and after World War II.
The project dedicated its first story to Grand Rapids philanthropist Henry Pestka, a Jew born in Ciechanow, Poland. He was held at KZ Auschwitz-Birkenau for nearly two years before escaping and joining the French resistance’s Polish battalion. He was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.
Pestka immigrated to the United States in 1946 and shortly settled in the Grand Rapids area. He began working at Bergman Auto near the corner of Hamilton Ave. and Leonard St. There, he met his wife, Beatrice, with whom he had two kids: Steven and Linda.
You can find the West Michigan Holocaust Memorial's coverage of Henry Pestka here.
“The idea was to take an individual who settled in Grand Rapids. You get a real understanding of where they came from. Where in Europe they came from, how they got here, what experiences they had during the Holocaust, but then, especially ending with the lives that they rebuilt in West Michigan.” Says Rob Franciosi, adding the West Michigan Holocaust Memorial used Henry Pestka’s story as a model from which they build on for other survivors.
Later in life, Pestka entered the real estate industry and worked closely with the dedication of Ahavas Israel in 1970. He died in 2013.
The urgency to record as many survivors’ testimonies isn’t lost on the West Michigan Holocaust Memorial. For Franciosi, time isn’t on his side. He says one survivor the project was working on covering passed away last Summer but was never able to be interviewed. Although the picture of who survivors were is not as clear as it would be with spoken testimony, the paper trail they leave behind still gives a glipse at their impact.
Age and health of survivors isn’t the only factor working against researchers. Especially directly after the Holocaust, survivors struggled to internalize their experiences, let alone express the trauma that came with them. It’s a limitation that serves as a constant barrier between survivors and the historians looking to document the full scope of the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century.
“My approach to this material has always been, you know, initially as a as a literary scholar, as someone interested in figurative language and whether the imagination can process these kinds of traumatic events and how it can be done. And I think that nearly all literary treatments of this material, grapple with this idea of the limitations of language. Can it express it?”
“The limits of language has always been at the heart of this at the heart of this field. You see it in the testimonies. When and when people are really testifying, they often run up against blocks, where they just can't put what they want to say into words. So they reach for things like metaphors and, or they compare it to life in hell. But to some degree, because they can't quite articulate what they witnessed.”
Currently, the West Michigan Holocaust Memorial hosts seven complete stories, many featuring first hand accounts, interviews, and detailed maps of survivors' journey from Europe to West Michigan. Professor Franciosi intends to launch more stories soon. He also says he would like to expand the scope of the project to include the children of Holocaust survivors as well as members of resistance groups which worked against the Nazis.
You can check out the West Michigan Holocaust Memorial here:
