The Anti-Defamation League tabulated nearly 3,700 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2022, a 36-percent increase over the previous year and the highest number recorded since the League began tracking them in 1979.
In the fall of 2023, a Montauk man spray-painted swastikas and antisemitic phrases in multiple locations in the hamlet. In 2017, torch-bearing white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, Va., after which then-President Trump said that there were “very fine people” among them.
Results of a 50-state survey of Holocaust knowledge among millennials and Generation Z released in 2020 showed that 63 percent of those surveyed did not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Over half the respondents believed the death toll was less than one-third that number. Nearly half could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during World War II.
As the number of eyewitnesses to the Holocaust dwindles, the axiom attributed to the philosopher George Santayana — “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” — rings disturbingly true. At East Hampton High School, an effort to educate students as to humanity’s capacity for inexpressible cruelty occurred this week with a screening of Christiane Arbesu’s “I am Judit,” documenting the experience of Judy Sleed of East Hampton, who escaped the Nazis in Budapest in 1944. On Tuesday, she answered questions posed by ninth-grade students, who with the tenth grade had watched the documentary as part of their global history studies.
“As a school, we always look to provide experiences for our students that foster tolerance, unity, and empathy,” Sara Smith, the principal, told The Star. “Judy’s story certainly accomplishes that.”
Ms. Sleed was 12 when her father and brother were taken from their house on Oct. 20, 1944; her mother three days later. Her tale of survival in the face of a murderous regime is difficult to comprehend, but her remarks revealed a quiet determination that young people should know a past that may seem ancient, but when seen in the fullness of human history is in fact very recent.
Her family’s whereabouts unknown, Ms. Sleed, staying in a bomb-damaged house, recalled wondering “What else can happen to me?” She slipped through a hole in the damaged structure and into the streets of Budapest. She found a cousin, who was taking care of her own elderly mother. The cousin had “survived by purchasing false papers,” Ms. Sleed said. “Some Jews did that, they purchased false papers saying that they are not Jewish, and some of my relatives survived that way.”
Her cousin “put me in a house that was protected by the Swiss government” (Switzerland was neutral during the war). “Somehow, neither the enemy nor the bombs found that house, so that’s where I survived.” Later, she stayed at a school that had been converted to an orphanage. She had a chance to emigrate to what was then Palestine, but declined.
“I was still waiting for my parents to come home,” she said, wondering if they had been sent to Siberia. They never came.
Before she was taken by the Nazis, her mother had shielded her from the tragic events underway in Europe. “I found things out the hard way,” Ms. Sleed said.
Eventually, she sailed to America, a seven-day journey. She did not learn of her family’s fate for years, she said. On the South Fork, she took a writing class, which required students to read certain books. One was about the Holocaust. “I read that book with heavy heart, because I knew what the ending was going to be,” she told the students. “One thing I didn’t know: It said that they gave the people postcards to write home before they went into the gas chamber. And I had a postcard like that from my father. . . . That’s when I knew what happened to them.”
Asked if she regrets not telling her children about her past, she replied “Yes and no. I didn’t talk about it mainly because it was very painful. I thought I was doing them a favor, not to let them know how hurt I was, and how much I missed my mother.” She still thinks of her family members suffering, living — and dying — in concentration camps. “They knew there was no way out,” she said. “A lot of times I think about that and . . . it hurts a lot.”
She channeled her grief by writing, eventually writing plays. Her self-published children’s book, “The Fight of the Crayons,” is available on Amazon. She is also a talented pianist.
“I’m very happy to share,” she told the students, “so the younger generation wouldn’t say that it never happened. . . . I just hope you don’t have to experience anything like I went through.”