A survivor’s legacy

Sam Harris

     This job has a way of circling back on you. I covered the opening of the Illinois Holocaust Museum on April 19, 2009, and wrote about deciding whether or not to talk with the Nazis who were picketing the event. I listened to the speeches, but didn't go inside — I'd been to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 1994. That was plenty. I finally visited Illinois's version in 2016, watching Chicago Police recruits get training there. 

     But when Rotary Magazine asked me to profile Holocaust Museum founder Sam Harris, I pulled the program from the opening — I have a good filing system — and there was Harris,  alongside Bill Clinton and future Gov. J.B. Pritzker. I was glad to meet Harris — to realize that the youngest holocaust survivors are still among us, a living link to the abyss — and to write this piece, which appears in the January issue of Rotary Magazine.    

    Sam Harris is passionate about it. He will meet you, even though he is 88 years old and uses a walker, in the somber industrial entrance of the museum he helped create, an institution dedicated to making sure the awful, important story that he lived is told, years after he is gone and his voice, among the dwindling firsthand accounts, is finally silenced.
     That wasn’t always the case.
     For many years Harris, a former insurance executive and a member of the Rotary Club of Northbrook, Illinois, didn’t want to talk about how the Nazis had come for him when he was a small boy. He didn’t want to talk about the terrible hunger. The fear. The machine guns. His murdered parents. The cattle cars. The concentration camps. It was old news, ancient history. What would be the point? He was an American now. First an American boy, living in Northbrook, a comfortable suburb north of Chicago. Then an American man who could choose for himself what to discuss. Or not discuss.
     His refusal went on for years. "I knew it troubled him, that it was all inside of him," says his wife of 62 years, Dede. "He just never spoke about his past. I could see it festering."
     The reluctance was complicated. He didn’t want people to feel sorry for him. And if he became successful, he wanted it to be because of who he was, not because of what happened to him, he explains, settling into a chair in the small but well-stocked library of his museum. If someone detected an accent and asked where he was from, he’d toss the question back: Where do you think I’m from? And if the person said "New York," Harris would say, "Yes, exactly! New York." Or if someone said, "Germany," he’d say, "Germany, yes, how did you know?" And smile.
     A trained social worker, Dede Harris eventually sat her husband down by a crackling fire one evening. "I asked him to tell the story," Dede recalls. "It seemed to have broken through that impasse. Once he was able to verbalize the feelings, he had to be open to other people."
     It began slowly. At a 1977 meeting of the Rotary Club of Wilmette, Illinois, Harris met a member, Rabbi William Frankel, who grew up in Vienna. Like Harris, Frankel had fled the Nazis, only he used his past as a springboard to a life of activism. Frankel had marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and was prominent in Catholic-Jewish outreach efforts. He befriended Harris and convinced him that he owed it to future generations to tell his story.
     Around that time, a group of neo-Nazis planned a demonstration in Skokie, a Chicago suburb that was half Jewish at the time and home to many Holocaust survivors. Though a lengthy legal battle prevented the demonstration, activists like Rabbi Frankel believed silence and inaction were no longer an option. Waiting and hoping while evil rises to its feet was never a smart strategy.
     Meanwhile, Arthur Butz, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, about 10 miles from where Harris lived, published a book with the claim that the Holocaust was a myth perpetuated by the Allies and Zionists. Frankel called Harris to express his abhorrence of the book. "Sam, I know it’s hard for you, but it’s time for you to talk," Frankel urged him.
     In Frankel’s basement, the rabbi interviewed Harris on video camera. "And it was the first time really, I was able to talk," says Harris. "I said to myself, I’ll never do this again. But he showed this to everybody in the congregation. And it was packed. And then he passed that around to other rabbis. That was all because of Rotary."

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