A child who died in an Auschwitz gas chamber is teaching Iranians about the horrors of the Holocaust that their president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies ever happened.
A fourteen-year-old child named Abramek Koplowics was killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz in 1943. Eliezer Grynfeld, of Jerusalem, older stepbrother of Abramek, found a notebook of poems written by the child in an attic that had held “family relics that had survived the Holocaust.”
Grynfeld, now 83, published his stepbrother’s poetry on an Israeli web site sponsored by Israel’s Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem. The site is translated into Farsi, because its goal is to help the Iranian people understand the reality of the Holocaust, which their president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, so vehemently and often denies.
Avner Shalev , who is the director of the museum says, "Ahmadinejad is using Holocaust denial as a concrete tool to pave the way for nuclear strikes. I'm afraid he is building up a wave of hatred and this is one of the only ways I can think of breaking it down.”
The web site launched on January 27, 2007, and it has had more than 10,000 hits in Iran along with hundreds of emails thanking them for offering this information. The Iranians tell them museums directors that procuring information about the Holocaust in next to impossible in Iran.
The child Abramek Koplowics’ poem “The Dream” continues to get the most hits. And it encourages many Iranians to respond, some in Farsi, yet often in broken English, as one man did: “I am sorry that my president tells such a crazy speeches against Holocaust. ... My eyes are full of tears when I see my little daughter and remember such a story. I am here to tell you: We do not think like Ahmadinejad."
Another testimony for the power of poetry.
