Faculty Highlight
Maria Orlowski
Maria Orlowski had the honor to give the Commencement Address at Albion College. Read her inspiring address below.
Members of the class of 2009, I am honored to be with you, today, at your commencement from Albion College. Madam President, Board of Trustees, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates. Thank you for giving me this honor. By inviting a Holocaust survivor, you remember the murdered Jews of Europe. You keep the memory alive. Now you are graduating and the world awaits your deeds. You want to live in a world that is ethical. You have a responsibility to protect the future.
I am a child Holocaust survivor. In Poland, in 1941, when I was eight years old, after two years of war and suffering spent with my family, I was sent into hiding. I survived by pretending that I wasn’t Jewish, convincing people that I was someone else. My parents and younger brother who had no way of escaping the guarded, occupied town of Ozarow, were lost, and probably perished in the death camp in Treblinka. I lost all the family that I had ever known.
We, the child survivors, are the last generation who witnessed the destruction of European Jews. Jewish children in Europe were specific targets singled out for destruction. Less than 7 percent of the Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Europe survived the Holocaust. They murdered us for being Jews.
You, the students and faculty of Albion College—a Christian learning institution, established by Methodist organizations—know that the future is shaped by the past. You keep the memory alive. I first had the honor of speaking here in 1998. The Holocaust Studies Program at Albion College, first taught by Professors Geoffrey Cocks and Frank Frick in the fall semester of 1996, included a visit by a survivor.
In 1999, during a trip to Germany, Poland, and Israel, Albion students came up with the idea of donating a memorial plaque to the site of Oskar Schindler's factory in Krakow. Since 2001, some of you have donated your time and labor to restore a neglected Jewish Cemetery in Wroclaw—a symbol of the Jewish life in Poland that had been there for centuries before the Holocaust. A world alive with art and culture, with love and promise for the future. Today, another group of students starts a trip to Poland. By study and by deeds, you keep the memory alive.
Today, I can speak to you, because in 1941, two young women—one Jewish and one Christian—chose active goodness. “There is a difference between passive goodness and active goodness,” wrote Nicolas Winton, who rescued Jewish children. “…active goodness entails going out, finding and helping those in suffering and danger and not merely leading an exemplary life, in the purely passive way of doing no wrong.”
My life was saved through a chance meeting of two strangers on a train. Cesia Weinlos had false papers stating that she was a Pole. She didn’t look Jewish. She came to Ozarow to fetch her nephew, for whom she had a hiding place. We were not related. She had no place to hide me. My curly black hair marked me as a Jew. But my mother begged her to take me away, so Cesia risked her own life and took along a Jewish girl. She was 20 years old; I was eight. Cesia’s active goodness saved my life.
On a train Cesia met Maryla. This righteous gentile risked her own life and hid a Jewish girl. She took me to a village where it was easier to hide, and I survived hiding in several small villages in Poland. Maryla’s active goodness saved my life.
I have often wondered why I survived. I am a witness. I have to reclaim the dead from the death of nonremembrance. In the future you will tell your children and grandchildren that you saw, and heard, a survivor at Albion College. Maybe that's why I survived, to tell you what happened. Some of you know my book, Trains: a Memoir of a Hidden Childhood during and after World War II.
When I left Poland in 1969, at age 36, I didn’t think that I’d be able to function in another language. But my sons—David, who was born in Boston in 1970, and his brother, Daniel, who left Poland at five—taught me English, while I worked in a store and took classes at night. I spoke to my children classmates in their respective schools and told my story of survival and loss. Later, I taught acting to American students. I directed Antigone and Ondine and Peer Gynt in an American college. Then I went back to school. In 1992, at 59, I earned a Ph. D., in theatre from Michigan State University. I wrote and published my memoir, Trains. Then I returned to teaching.
One of the reasons I love teaching is that it lets me make a difference in someone else’s life. In the past, good teachers affected my life. I followed their example. In a clandestine classroom in the Warsaw ghetto, a teacher put her life in danger to teach me to read and to love books. How can we act in these times to honor the past and shape the future? IT IS UP TO US.
It is up to us to choose active goodness.
