Elk Grove students get “direct link” to lessons of Holocaust

Ralph Rehbock and his family survived the Holocaust, he said, because a few courageous people acted on their convictions, rather than look the other way. He calls them “upstanders.”

“It's the opposite of being a bystander,” Rehbock told more than 300 eighth graders Wednesday at Margaret Mead Junior High School in Elk Grove Village. “It's doing something because you know it's the right thing to do.”

Rehbock described the early Nazi movement in the mid-1930s as the bullies of their day and told students of the conditions his family endured.

One student, Jung Han of Hoffman Estates, said hearing the descriptions of Nazi Germany brought her history lessons to life.

“He's a connection,” Han said. “We learn about it in class, but it's only on paper. Here's a real person, coming to talk to us.”

It was Rehbock's third presentation at the school, and one of many he has made to schools and organizations, especially since the opening of the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie, of which he is on the board of directors.

Rehbock. who was four years old when he and his family escaped Nazi Germany, spent most of his 90-minute talk describing the conditions that led to the Holocaust and the genocide of six million Jews.

“It is important to understand how this thing called the Holocaust was allowed to happen,” said Rehbock, of Northbrook.

Social studies teacher Mark Fletcher said Rehbock's presentation came on the heels of the World War II unit and the study of the Holocaust and other 20th Century genocides.

“He is a direct link, a direct voice,” Fletcher said. “We're not going to have these kinds of direct links much longer. That's what makes his presentation so powerful.”

Rehbock described how his parents, Hans and Ruth, made the decision to leave Germany in 1938, after one of his mother's cousins in Chicago signed an affidavit of support for them. Many other countries were unwilling to take in Jewish refugees, Rehbock said.

While waiting in Berlin to have their papers processed, they watched from their hotel window as the synagogue across the street was burned the “Night of the Broken Glass.” It was one of more than 1,600 synagogues across Germany damaged or burned that night.

Their papers eventually were stamped and the family fled, eventually making it safely to the United States. His mother's sister and 10-year-old cousin stayed behind.

“She thought Hitler would eventually go away,” Rehbock said.

His aunt and her son remained in hiding from 1938 to 1943 — with the help of more upstanders — before they were captured and sent to Auschwitz.

It wasn't until 2000, when Rehbock's mother died at the age of 94, that he discovered a letter written by his aunt, Rennie, just days before her capture.

“It is hard for me to write this letter,” his aunt said. “Our situation is more than tragic, but other plans have been made for us.”

His aunt pleaded for Rehbock's family to thank the three families in Berlin that had hid her and her son. It closed by asking the family not to forget them.

“That's what I'm asking you,” Rehbock told his young audience, “not to forget just Rennie and Alfred, but all of them. All of the millions of Jews who were killed.”