Marking eight decades since Auschwitz was liberated at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center

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Moshe Furshpan was 10 when he was forced to flee into a forest, alone, in what was then Poland and is now Ukraine, as Nazi soldiers rounded up his family and neighbors to be executed. For three years, Furshpan survived on berries, tree bark and mushrooms, evading patrols and enduring harsh winters.
One night he sought shelter in a ditch he dug among birch trees, with a mother and her infant. As the distant howls of German shepherds drew closer, the woman, faced with an unthinkable choice, took Furshpan’s small hand and forced him to silence her crying baby.
“My father was haunted by this his entire life,” Bernie Furshpan, board member of the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center, told a small crowd of around 100 people at the center last Sunday.
After the war, Moshe Furshpan found refuge in a displaced-persons camp in Munich before emigrating to Israel in 1946. “He turned out to be one of the kindest and gentlest souls I’ve ever known,” his son, said. “He was so grateful to be alive. He didn’t take anything for granted — not his kids, not his friends, not even toilet paper.”
The gathering last weekend commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day, on Monday, and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The event took place against a backdrop of rising antisemitism, and a recent Anti-Defamation League survey indicating that nearly half of all people worldwide hold “elevated levels of antisemitic attitudes.”

Bernie Furshpan, 67, delivered the keynote address, and focused on the 1.5 million Jewish children who were murdered in the Holocaust. “That number is the equivalent of the entire population of Nassau County,” he said. “Imagine every single person here being methodically, systematically slaughtered.”
Furshpan recounted the mass executions carried out by the Nazi death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, and the brutal conditions of the ghettos. “The Einsatzgruppen murdered my 4-year-old uncle,” he said. “My Aunt Hannah, my father’s other siblings, my grandparents — all taken. Only my father survived.”
Alan Mindel, chair of the HMTC, emphasized the urgency of remembrance. “For those who don’t remember history, we are bound to repeat it,” he said. Mindel highlighted a recent incident in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in which a kosher restaurant was vandalized with graffiti calling for genocide. “We have come to a point where swastikas throughout our community have been normalized,” he said, referring to graffiti on the HMTC building. “Hate has been allowed to take root and flourish.”
Mindel, who is also the son of Holocaust survivors, reflected on all the survivors, including his parents, who refrained from discussing their experiences. “While we are blessed by those who tell their story, most survivors were like my parents,” he said. “They didn’t want to burden their children with the horrors they had endured.”
Regina Grossman, who was taken to Auschwitz as a teenager, rarely spoke about her experiences, Elana Blumenfeld, Grossman’s granddaughter, said.
“No matter how many books you read, how many movies you watch, or stories you hear — multiply it by a million,” Blumenfeld said, quoting her grandmother in a call to the Herald. “You’ll never understand the horror.”
Blumenfeld said that the trauma of the Holocaust hardened her grandmother, shaping her into a tough and resilient woman. “It wasn’t until she developed dementia that I saw who she truly was — soft, gentle, affectionate,” she said. “The war robbed her of that.”
With Holocaust survivors and their immediate descendants aging, Blumenfeld stressed the responsibility of the next generation to preserve their legacies. “We carry the burden because we know they’re not here,” she said. “It’s our responsibility to tell these stories to our kids, so they can tell theirs.”
Rabbi Irwin Huberman, of Congregation Tiferith Israel, in Glen Cove spoke about the importance of Holocaust education in an era of increasing denial and misinformation.
“It’s important that this not just be a Jewish commemoration, but an international one,” Huberman said in a call with the Herald. He stressed that with the dwindling number of survivors, it is imperative that institutions like the HMTC preserve their stories and educate future generations.
“The Nazis kept meticulous records of their atrocities — there’s no debate about what happened,” Huberman said. “As we lose more survivors, it’s important that we make the effort to research the actual documentation that the Nazis kept, and to listen to the remaining voices who were there and observed this personally.”