By Sam Gilkey
For the News-Gazette

In 1994, the Florida Legislature passed the Holocaust Education Bill, which requires all school districts to incorporate lessons on the Holocaust as part of public school instruction.

As the school year came to a close, students at St. Cloud High who had been learning about the events that took place during World War II heard from two people very close to the era.

At an assembly May 30, Orlando author Greg Dawson and retired Kissimmee businessman Harry Lowenstein talked about the Holocaust and how it has impacted their lives.

Dawson’s book “Hiding in the Spotlight” was published in 2009 and tells the story of his mother, Zhanna, who was able to escape death in the Nazi concentration camps.

In 1941, when the Jewish family was sent to be executed, Zhanna and her sister, Frina, managed to flee to the Ukrainian countryside. They were taken in by a couple who were able to get them into a Christian orphanage.

Both girls played the piano and their musical gifts helped place them with a troop of entertainers who performed for German soldiers and in slave-labor camps.

After the war ended, the sisters made their way to New York City and enrolled at Juilliard on scholarships. Zhanna married violinist David Dawson and in 1948, the couple moved to Indiana University to join the music faculty at the school.

Greg Dawson’s wife, Candy, showed the students a film she made in the Ukraine while her husband did research for the book.

The Dawsons traveled to where 15,000 Jews were murdered, among them Zhanna and Frina’s parents. On a memorial listing the dead, Dawson was shocked to find his mother’s name.

“I had come that close to nonexistence,” he said.

Dawson told the students that he did not know his mother’s story of survival until he was 30 years old.

Answering the question of why we study the story of the Holocaust, Dawson said, “There have been many things in history we don’t want to repeat. We want to make sure this never happens again.”

“This is easier to grasp today because of recent events in this area,” he said, referring to the arrests of several Osceola County residents who are members of an anti-Semitic group and allegedly a part of a domestic terrorist organization.

“We had that race war 50 years ago,” Dawson said, “and guess what? They lost and at a terrible price of 60 million Jews. That hatred is always there and the best antidote is knowledge.”

Lowenstein

Lowenstein, now 81, gave a first-person account of his life before and after the Nazis took control of the government.

In the summer of 1940, his family lived in Germany and were told they, and others, were to be resettled in Latvia. It was there that 30,000 Jews were killed in three days and their bodies thrown into shallow pits.

Lowenstein and his family managed to avoid that slaughter. However, in 1943, the family was shipped to a concentration camp. His father was eventually sent to an extermination center while his mother and sister remained in the camp. Out of 80 young boys in the camp, he was one of five boys chosen to work in a garage cleaning cars.

“When it came to asking us how old we were, I always lied,” he recalled. “I always was 18, even though I wasn’t.”

Anyone under 18 was usually killed, he said.

As the Russian Army came closer to the camp in September of 1944, he and many others were put on a boat and taken to Poland where, in early 1945 they began a march to Germany.

When he was finally liberated later that year, he said he was 14-years-old and weighed 64 pounds.

After the war ended, Lowenstein made his way to Paris and in early 1949 was able to come to the United States by ship.

“I had $3 in my shoe,” he said. “Because all my pockets had holes in them. I had relatives here who helped me out.”

His first job was in a slaughterhouse during the day which allowed him to go to school at night so he could learn English.

He returned to Germany in 1953 as a U.S. soldier assigned to an intelligence unit. Lowenstein subsequently came to Florida and in 1973 purchased a Kissimmee store that he and his wife ran until 2001.

Asked by a student if his views about humanity had changed in the years following his experiences, Lowenstein replied, “Yes, for the better. The message I would leave today is to be kind to each other.”

Dustin Patton, a junior, said he learned much more about the Holocaust as a result of the program, especially small, intimate details of the lives of those who lived through the era.

“I have seen many people struggle, but never like those I heard about today,” Chelsea Griffin, 16, said. “This makes me want to learn more about my family’s history.”