More than 150 parents, friends, faculty members and other Virginia Wesleyan community members gathered on Sunday, Dec. 9 in the C-MAC of the Jane P. Batten Student Center to honor 61 December graduates who will complete their studies at Virginia Wesleyan at the end of the semester.
Graduates, families and friends were greeted and congratulated by President William T. "Billy" Greer, Associate Dean of Dean of the College Dr. Robert Albertson, Alumni Board President Dan Mason '88 and the Rev. Robert "Chappy" Chapman '79.
"This experience never grows old and this is a wonderful event filled with joy," said President Greer. "Your degree from this fine College I believe has prepared you will for the rest of you life. Congratulations."
Dr. William Ruehlmann, professor of journalism/communications and the 2007 recipient of the Samuel Nelson Gray Distinguished Teaching Award, addressed the students. In the address titled, "Guardians," Ruehlmann stressed the importance of making wise and responsible decisions through a story told to him by a Holocaust survivor.
"You are the participants in a liberal arts education. You, each one of you, have proven you can be responsible for yourselves. Now you must be responsible for the rest of us," said Ruehlmann. "Because one thing you have learned from a liberal arts education is that we ARE our brother's and sister's keepers; another thing you have learned is that WE haven't done a perfect job of it."
His speech is printed below in its entirety.
"Guardians" by Dr. William Ruehlmann
President Greer, Associate Dean Albertson, Chappy, Colleagues, December Graduates, Emerald:
I have come to share with you a true story, exactly as it was told to me, in person, 20 years ago:
The doors of the cattle car came open with a crash, and more dead captives than living fell out.
"I saw strange buildings at the end of the world," Esther Kutner remembers. "I thought to myself, 'Dear God. Is this where we're going?
"It looked like Hell."
It was Auschwitz, the concentration camp. She was a Jew, arrived on another train of prisoners in 1944. Everything – the ground, the barracks, the electrified fence – was gray as iron and ashes.
"Right then and there," says Kutner, "I lost the rest of my family completely, just at the twist of a thumb."
In front of the forming columns stood a tall Nazi, shining of brass and boots. This was Joseph Mengele, "the Angel of Death." He would personally select 400,000 people to die at Auschwitz.
On others, he would experiment, hoping to produce a race with blond hair and blue eyes.
"I held my Mom on one side," says Kutner, "my sister held Mom on the other side, and my brother was beside my sister. With a twist of his thumb I was pointed in this direction, and the rest of my family was pointed in that direction. And that was the end.
"I never saw my family again."
Kutner sits in the Marriott restaurant on Broad Street in Richmond. Musak makes incongruous counterpoint to her memories. An order of hot tea sits before her, untouched.
It was one week before Yom Hashoah, Remembrance Day, and Kutner is a survivor of the Holocaust it recalls.
"This is not as I wished it," Kutner says. "I was so afraid if I told it, others would learn to hate. And I thought, let it stop somewhere.
"But some things do not go away."
Kutner is a short woman of little more than 5 feet. She is married to another concentration camp survivor, Leo Kutner, owner of Artisan Upholstering and Interiors of Richmond. They have three grown children and four grandchildren.
Kutner's eyes are brown, her hair dark and curly. She wears gold earrings, a gold necklace, a gold watch. There is nothing in her outward appearance to suggest the ordeal of Auschwitz, but the scars are there.
She wakes up screaming.
"I have no pictures," Kutner says. "I have not a single picture of my family. Good Lord, what wouldn't I have given for just one.
"When my oldest son got married, I did not know what was making me cry. I was weeping uncontrollably, and I was thinking: Mom is not here. This is the legacy of the war.
"Pain never goes away."
The daughter of a tailor, Kutner lived in the Polish town of Brezing, southwest of Warsaw. She was the oldest of two brothers and a sister. Her father died before the war of pneumonia, "the only positive thing."
"Anything else in this period is so hard," says Kutner, "there is not a language yet invented to convey what happened."
The first time she saw a tank was the day the walls shook from their occupying presence in September 1939. Then, she thought it exciting.
"They concentrated the entire Jewish population from the city in a very few blocks, and in each room was a family. So, immediately through the duration, no schools, no doctors. They surrounded the ghetto with a fence and guards."
Cruelty became routine.
"They took a number of us girls and they separated us out at the Jewish Community Center. And the German soldiers wanted to entertain themselves, so they took scissors and cut our long braids. That was the style at that time, long braids tied with ribbons which matched the dress.
"And they cut my hair shoulder-length and took pictures of it. The hair of a girl was her crowning glory; I remember when I came home I was hysterical for about two weeks. I thought that was the worst thing that could happen to me."
She was wrong.
In 1941, the Jewish population of Brezing was "resettled" – uprooted, shipped and sequestered – in Lidmanstadt, formerly Lodz. Kutner can only remember the winters of this war.
It seemed always cold.
"I will tell you how well they organized things, how systematically," she says. "I delivered my youngest brother, Nisan, to the Germans. Nobody could comprehend in their wildest imagination what they were doing.
"They wanted a certain amount of very young ones. They said they are going to send them to a children’s camp. This, we believed.
"Me being the oldest, I collected from everybody a little cube of sugar, a slice of bread, a ball. I put it in a knapsack. I practiced with the child: 'You need to promise me to be sure to write at least once a week.'
"Nisan. Blond, green eyes. Five, 6 years old.
"And I brought him to the place where they were concentrated, at a certain building. After the war we found out what they did with all these children. They were gassed immediately."
Eventually the ghetto was closed. The survivors of hunger and privation, mostly teenaged, were packed in cattle cars for Auschwitz. In those cars they slept, eliminated, suffocated where they stood.
"People ask me the color of the camp," Kutner says. "There were no colors. Everything I remember is dark gray."
There they lay, on shelves, six deep.
"I remember the terrible roll calls, which lasted forever. During those roll calls, when the wind blew, we embraced each other to protect ourselves. They were so sadistic toward us, they would push us apart with a stick.
"After the war, they said Hitler did it all.
"Hitler wasn't standing there with a stick, pushing us apart."
The Germans were good at roll calls, at keeping records. They were always there with their long legal pads, counting the dead and the living. Kutner recalls an older woman who pointed to the red sky one night.
"Child," the woman told her, "do you know that they are burning people?"
Kutner the teenager believed the woman had lost her mind from hardship.
She hadn't.
"Auschwitz consisted of many parts," Kutner says. "The place where I was, you did nothing.
"Obviously we were just assigned to wait until the end."
With Allied troops moving in, Auschwitz was closed down. Germans feared the outrage of the liberating armies. They began to march the survivors to death.
"The SS were howling and screaming at us. They had flashlights hidden behind their uniforms to make the lines straight. Everything was done in the dark, because they were afraid of the airplanes already flying over."
It was a long march. Sometimes they slept in stables. When marchers fell, they were shot.
"They wanted no witnesses left," Kutner says, "to tell the story to the Allies."
At Glagow, they dug trenches. They dug graves. They marched some more.
"Can you imagine, among these skeletons marching, so many miles, 20 to 30 a day, how many fell? Anyone going to fall, we would hold them for another few yards, so they wouldn't get killed so fast. We would drag them a few yards more."
One night, Kutner and three other women escaped into the tree line. Perhaps because of the snow, bloodhounds never found them. One died anyway.
After 12 days running and hiding, getting food where they could, they saw American soldiers approaching on the road.
"They picked us up. They took us in the Jeep. They were so angry, because they had seen the camps.
"I called them my Golden Boys."
Slowly, in an American hospital, the women got well. It was six months before they could walk again. One now lives in France, one in Israel.
Kutner came to Richmond; she didn't talk about her experience for 13 years.
"When my oldest child was about 7 years old, he came home, and he asked me a question: 'Mom, what does it mean to be Jewish?' I gave a shudder. I said, not in America.
"He went to the temple, his friends went to the church, that was the only difference.
"So I said, 'What happened?'"
Children had formed a club and told the boy he could not join because he was Jewish.
"So I did what every mother would do, told him there were different people, and some of them didn't like others for all sorts of reasons – hair color, skin, religion, God knows what. And at this time I knew that, sooner or later, I would have to start talking and tell the children. So they would know what it meant.
"Because I had thought in my mind that the world had learned its lesson from this war. That there would be peace and decency forever. But I grew up, and the world is as you see.
"You have to be on guard."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
So what can Esther Kutner's old story possibly mean to you on this new day?
You are the participants in a liberal arts education. You, each one of you, have proven you can be responsible for yourselves. Now you must be responsible for the rest of us.
A democracy says the majority rules. But the majority is not always right. You are seated at the edge of a city that 50 years ago closed its schools rather than let African Americans into them.
And last month a nominee for Attorney General of the United States, questioned by a Congressional committee that approved his nomination, would not define waterboarding as torture.
You have to be on guard.
Because one thing you have learned from a liberal arts education is that we ARE our brother's and sister's keepers; another thing you have learned is that WE haven't done a perfect job of it.
And that is the last lesson, graduates of Virginia Wesleyan College. Are you hungry, my brother? My sister, are you warm?
Congratulations, graduates. God bless you. Now, it is YOUR turn.
12.12.07