For years, Larry Lesser took the advice of other Jews and Holocaust survivors who told him to bury his memories of World War II.
"'Don't talk about it, keep it to yourself.' You heard it all the time," says Lesser, who spent the first years of the war living with his family behind the Nazi-built brick walls of Warsaw, Poland's Jewish ghetto.
Eventually he escaped the ghetto, only to wander alone through Poland for the rest of the war. He never again saw his parents. He assumes they died in a concentration camp.
Lesser, born Lolek Lejzerowicz 60 years ago, now talks freely about the Holocaust and his wartime experiences. He decided two years ago that it was time to speak up, after taking part in the Baltimore Jewish Council's Project for Video Documentation of Holocaust Survivor Testimonies.
Putting his life's story on four hours of videotape "opened my mind to how important it is that [the history of the Holocaust] be preserved," says Lesser, of Columbia, a manager with the Sta-Dri paint company in Odenton. "If we forget what happened, it could happen to Jews again, or to any other ethnic or racial
group. Everyone has a stake in remembering."
Initiated almost three years ago, the BJC's video project recently received new funding, just as its coordinator, Froma Willen, was worrying that the program would perish from a lack of money.
The initial three-year endowment of $45,600 from the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Fund for the Enrichment of Jewish Education expired last summer. But then the Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore announced in September that one of its supporting funds, the Harry Weinberg Family Foundation, would give the project $7,500 for each of the next two years.
The video project is modeled on a similar program started 12 years ago in Connecticut by a television producer and a psychiatrist who was a survivor. By 1981, the two men had taped 200 interviews and given them to Yale University.
Those tapes formed the basis of what is now the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. The archive contains the video remembrances of 2,200 individuals, including concentration camp survivors, soldiers who liberated camps and righteous Gentiles" who helped Jews during the war.
Many of the tapes at Yale have been donated by the more than 20 regional programs, such as the BJC's, that have been interviewing Holocaust survivors and witnesses throughout the United States.
