Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on March 5, 2024

Retired teacher, Charles Moman, speaks to sophomore at Seymour High School about the Holocaust and his experiences visiting Auschwitz.

Erika Malone | The Tribune

Retired music teacher Charles Moman of Seymour took this picture of Holocaust survivor Eva Kor holding a photo from the day the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated. She is standing near where the photo was actually taken. Moman traveled with Kor, who died on July 4, 2019, to the site in the summer of 2015.

Charles Moman

Seymour High School sophomores continued their path of learning about the Holocaust after listening to a talk from retired teacher, Charles Moman, and his Journey to Auschwitz.

Approximately 6 million Jews were taken from their homes, dehumanized and murdered during Word War II. While 6 million can be a large number to grasp, Moman showed the students a way to understand the loss on a personal level.

The average daily murder count at Auschwitz was more than 7,000, or the population of Seymour High School (1,500) five times a day. This also equates to wiping out every resident in Jackson County in one week.

From August to October of 1944, the daily murder count was 15,000, or Seymour High Schools population times 10 a day. It also equates to the clearing out population of Seymour in less than two days.

Its more than just a number, said sophomore Jonathan Scott. Its personal and really impactful.

In his photojournalism presentation, Moman shared his experiences visiting the Nazi death camps in 2015 along with the life of a close friend Eva Kor, a Holocaust survivor who has since passed away.

Kor was a Jewish native of Romania who was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 at the age of 10. She was separated from her family who did not survive the Holocaust. Kor and her twin sister, Miriam, survived.

Moman, who shot thousands of photos and video footage during his trips to Poland, discussed how he met Kor and learning of the work she had accomplished for CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute.

Kor died July 4, 2019, in Krakow, Poland, 45 minutes away from Auschwitz, while on an annual educational trip with CANDLES. She was 85.

Moman said every year fewer people know about the Holocaust and its significance in history.

According to PEW Research Center, 45% know approximately 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Nearly three in 10 Americans say they are not sure how many Jews died during the Holocaust while one in 10 overestimate the death toll.

Moman said anti-Semitism began long before the reign of Hitler and the Nazi regime, but with the affects of Word War 1, prejudice against the Jewish people escalated to dangerous levels.

Words such as useless eaters, rats and less than human were often used to describe the Jews in an effort to dehumanize, he said.

The ultimate goal for the Nazi regime was to create a pure race, Moman said.

It began with hateful words and prejudice and this is an example of how it can lead to the extreme, he said.

Before meeting Kor, Moman said he knew next to nothing about the Holocaust, but during the summer of 2012 while attending a three-day workshop at Indiana State University a friendship blossomed.

We had field trips we could choose from and I chose to go to the CANDLES Holocaust Museum, he said. We really connected right off the bat and became very good friends. Its not just about the Holocaust, I want you to hear her story even though she has passed away.

Kor and Miriam were subjected to medical experiments as children at the hands of Dr. Josef Mengele, infamously nicknamed the Angel of Death.

After introducing himself to Kor, Moman told her he also was a twin and there was a second set of twins in his family.

Evas immediate response was Oh, Charles, Dr. Mengele would have loved you, Moman said. That was our dark joke between us that she would tell me all the time, including one of my last emails a couple weeks before she died.

Kor was known as a controversial survivor as she advocated for forgiveness in order to heal.

Moman said Kor did not absolve the Nazis for their actions, but forgave them on her behalf to feel free from victimhood.

Forgiveness is nothing more and nothing less, but an act of self-healing and self-empowerment, Kor said in an interview before she passed. I immediately felt the pain lifted from my shoulder and I was no longer a prisoner of my tragic past.

One student shared her thoughts on the concept of forgiveness.

I think it shows what kind of person she is with how much she went through, Lorae Drake said. She was torn apart and was still able to forgive. It shows the power of forgiveness and how we as people need to be reminded of that.

While recovering from a near-fatal auto accident in 2014, Moman began to binge-watch Holocaust documentaries on Netflix, including one about Eva Kor called Forgiving Dr. Mengele.

That fall, he signed up to attend the 70th commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz with Kor and traveled there with her in January of 2015.

Needing to know more, he returned in the summer of that year by himself and spent a full week at Auschwitz. He joined Kor and her summer tour group at the end of that trip.

I just loved Eva, he said. I will get emotional sometimes just talking about her. She was very endearing and a wonderful person.

Because his near-fatal wreck, Moman wears a bracelet that includes contact and personal information, in addition to Evas ID number that was tattooed on her in Auschwitz, and the words never give up.

In 1995, Kor opened up CANDLES Museum to honor her sister and search the world for the remaining twins. Since its establishment they have found more than 150 remaining twins that survived the Holocaust.

Moman frequently speaks at libraries and continues to donate 100% of his speaking honorarium to CANDLES. He wrapped up his talk with the importance of a moral compass and how the Holocaust is a prime example of easy it was for those to see a group of people as less than human.

People like to say the Nazis were monsters, he said. They were not monsters, they did monstrous things, but they were everyday people like you and me that were so convinced that Jews were the problem. They believed in a mission.

One students shared his thoughts after the presentation.

This was really impactful, said Blayke Chase. It really dug deep into the different concentration camps and put the numbers of people killed into perspective. I wasnt aware of some of the other death camps before the talk.

According to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also known as the Claims Conference 245,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors are alive today.

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SHS sophomores dive deep into the Holocaust - Seymour Tribune

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