Vigil commemorates Holocaust victims

Charles C. Labenz Arizona Daily Wildcat Holocaust survivors Rachael and Irving Senor helped read the names of 22,000 victims of the Holocaust on the UA Mall yesterday. Rachael and Irving met two days after they were liberated from the concentration camps. Three weeks later they were married.

As part of a memorial vigil sponsored by Hillel's Conference on the Holocaust committee, 22,000 names will be read over a period of 25 hours, from noon yesterday until 1 p.m. today.

Students, faculty and a few survivors took a few minutes or a few hours of their time to participate in the vigil, reading the names and ages of victims of the Jewish massacre.

Originally from Greece, Senor was marked with a number, like millions of other Jews, in a concentration camp.

Senor said he was forced into labor when he was 8 years old. He was in Auschwitz in 1943. That same year, he was transported to a concentration camp in Warsaw, Poland, where he was given the task of carrying corpses and arranging them in piles of 500 to be incinerated.

"We used to take the dead people behind the camp and make a big pile," he said.

Senor said more than 50 of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust.

On May 2, 1945, Senor gained his freedom. Immediately following his liberation, he met Rachael, born in Lithuania, whom he married three weeks later.

"I didn't have anybody," he said. "When you're liberated and you have nobody, what do you do?"

This is the fifth year Hillel organized the vigil, which is intended to educate people about the Holocaust, said Staci Tiras, conference chairperson and a family studies senior.

"It (the Holocaust) is not a Jewish problem," Tiras said. "It is imperative that we continue educating."

Tiras said the names of the deceased are collected from the Holocaust Memorial in Israel and from people around campus and the Tucson community.

"We end up getting people who want to stay all night," Tiras said.

She said reading the names and associating them with the history of the Holocaust is often times draining.

"It gets really emotional," she said.

Lisa Yue, an agriculture and biosystems engineering graduate student, said she felt disgusted as she browsed yesterday through photos of starving people trapped in concentration camps displayed on the Mall.

"I still don't understand what is the motivation of these massacres," Yue said. "From a historical point of view, it is very important to be knowledgeable so that in our generations we can keep this disaster from happening."

Rachael and Irving Senor said they obtained their visas in 1949 to come to the United States. They lived in Cincinnati and came to Tucson to retire.

They now visit high schools and middle schools in Tucson and speak about their experience in the Holocaust.

"We tell them to think about that," Rachael said.

Irving said they each have five to six pounds of letters at home from students at schools they have visited.

Although they both agreed that it is no longer difficult to speak of the Holocaust, Irving said he cried seven years ago when he told a group of University of Arizona students about his brother's execution. His brother was hanged for attempting to escape from a concentration camp.