Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Holocaust survivor speaks at Washington State U.
By Monique LeTourneau
Daily Evergreen (Washington State U.)
03/07/2007

(U-WIRE) PULLMAN, Wash. — Noemi Ban loves a good, clean cup of water. A simple, white paper cup with her pink-lipsticked mouth imprinted on the rim stayed by her side Monday evening.

"Every time I come to speak, they ask me, 'Noemi, what would you like to drink?'" said Ban, a Bellingham, Wash., resident and keynote speaker for the Washington State University Holocaust Week of Remembrance. "I believe they could think I am advertising water." Cup of water in hand, Ban told her story of survival during the Holocaust as a Hungarian Jew — an experience in which basic needs such as clean water were luxuries.

The standing-room-only event drew approximately 110 people to the Fine Arts Auditorium, said Honors College professor R. Wes Leid, who helped coordinate events for the Week of Remembrance.

Ban opened the evening by showing a brief video tracking a visit back to Auschwitz, one of the two concentration camps she endured. She and four family members were sent there in March 1944. She was the only one of them who survived the camp.

"You would think when you go — this is the fourth time for me — it gets easier," Ban said in the video. "No." Throughout the evening, Ban relived her experience in vivid detail, starting with the Nazi invasion in Hungary and concluding with her liberation by a "good-looking" American soldier during a death march leaving the Buchenwald camp, where she had performed labor work at a sub-camp called Allendorf.

Though she travels regularly to share this story, it still brings tears to her eyes.

"The story is here and here," Ban said, gesturing to her head and heart. "When I tell this story, it is like I am reliving it." Ban was not the only one crying by the end of the evening. Her speech prompted dialogue and emotion from the audience Monday evening.

Andrea Ligon, a junior humanities major, visited Auschwitz in the past and felt Ban's speech supplemented her experience.

"It was my first time seeing a Holocaust survivor, but I knew what she was talking about and about the kind of emotion of going back to that," Ligon said. "I'm glad I got to come experience it. I didn't really know what it was about [before I came], but her message was really powerful." Leid said it was the first time a Holocaust survivor spoke at the WSU Week of Remembrance, which is in its fourth year.

"She's a wonderful speaker," Leid said. "She makes a connection with everyone." Ban said the desire to counter recent rumors that the Holocaust never happened, in addition to spreading a message against hatred and generalization, prompts her to continue traveling and speaking.

At the end of the evening, Ban thanked the audience for its attentiveness.

"I did see a lot of shiny eyes. You were with me, and this feeling gives me strength over and over to keep going," Ban said. "In every society, there are good people and bad people. We cannot generalize. We have to see individuals one-by-one. I hope you'll see what prejudice, victory and hatred do when they go uncontrolled."

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