“You cannot tell me it was worth it for my family to die.”

Senior Nina Harris made this comment during a heated discussion one day in AP Language and Composition in response to a classmate who had pointed out that some good came out of the  Holocaust, arguing that Jews face less discrimination today.

Harris’ retort to her classmate’s “borderline anti-Semitic” comment was more than just a reaction to something from a history book. It was personal.

Whether out of luck or other circumstances, her grandparents on her mother’s side, both of whom had been teenagers at the time, survived the Holocaust, though the rest of their family was murdered. Although her grandparents passed away before she was born, Harris is “actively aware” of their experiences and cares deeply about her family’s past, a journey she is able to narrate with detail.

Prior to World War II, Harris’s grandfather, whose first name was Henry, and her great-grandfather had been living in Berlin, Germany. In the days leading up to Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”), the first Nazi attack on Jews that occurred in November 1948, Harris’s great-grandfather could feel that “something bad was happening.” Just days before the attack, he followed his instinct and packed his and his son’s bags for America. They needed to “get out of [there],” Harris said. And they did.

Henry and his father were some of the lucky few to be granted refuge by the U.S. During the 1940s, according to The Washington Post, “the nation turned away thousands of Jews fleeing the Third Reich, even though immigration quotas remained unfilled.” Some of these forsaken refugees returned to Europe, where they were later murdered in the Holocaust.

Harris’ grandmother, whose first name was Zina, unlike her grandfather, was unable to leave Europe. At the time of the war, Zina was living with her mother, stepfather and younger sister in Lithuania, the southernmost Baltic state located north of Poland. Harris’s grandmother was 16 at the time and was taken away from her home by a friend of her stepfather, a non-Jewish engineer much older than her. He promised safety if she would live with him.

She followed him and fell victim to him.

Together they lived in a labor camp, where the engineer’s promise of protection was soon forgotten. Zina was still forced to go to various lineups, where people would be chosen to be taken away on trains to be burned.

“[The engineer] said that he saved her life, but he always put her life on the line,” Harris said. “She still had to go to the lineups, [and he] never tried to get her out of that.” 

Because of her good looks and ability to speak German, however, Harris’s grandmother got through every lineup she was in.

Eventually, after a few years in the labor camp, she escaped one day and hid in a church attic for a while before Europe was liberated.

In 1945, after the war had ended, she moved to Mexico, where her father was living at the time. She thus avoided Auschwitz, the “largest mass murder site in human history,” according to The Guardian. There,  prisoners, including members of her family, were beaten, shot, hanged to death and killed by poisonous gas.

The effects of the Holocaust have been long-lasting for Harris’s family. Knowing her little sister had died, Harris’s grandmother had trouble readjusting after the war. For Harris’s mother, it meant that she was under more restrictions growing up; she was not, for instance, allowed to have sleepovers.

Harris said that despite the fact that her mother lived in Beverly Hills, her grandmother was “strict,” though not in the way many Saratoga students often view the word.

“Instead of it being like ‘Oh you can't go out; I need you to get perfect grades,’ it was ‘Oh, you can't go out because I'm scared that if you're gone for too long, that you're going to get shot,’” Harris said.

Harris’s mother was expected to be home before it got dark out, and Harris said her grandmother would often fall into “phases of not being healthy,” succumbing to her PTSD.

“[My grandma] was scared all the time,” Harris said. “My grandma was a very, very, very, very anxious person — that would be the nicest way of saying it, [but] it was all very understandable. She was never very trusting and kept to herself, and was definitely a little bit mentally ill.”

Now a third-generation Holocaust survivor, Harris is very involved in the Jewish community. She has gone to a Jewish summer camp, Camp Tawonga, since she was 8 and attended a Jewish school up until high school.

Harris remembers celebrating Yom Ha'Shoah, a day commemorating the Holocaust, when each year her old school would be filled with yellow roses.

“Yizkor is a word in Hebrew and it means ‘to remember,’” Harris said. “That's the spokes word of the Holocaust, and the idea is to remember that that's the way to prevent something from happening again.”

Harris believes that being Jewish means more to her than others who are technically Jewish but do not have a personal connection to the Holocaust.

“People like me who are so affected by it and whose families are affected by it still find the Holocaust a very important event, and we all know a lot about it,” Harris said.

Most students at SHS, however, do not understand the significance of the Holocaust. Harris has encountered instances in which ignorant people made insensitive, borderline anti-Semitic jokes. Even so, she feels that it does not come from a negative place and can be fixed with learning.

“I think that is (in some way) a fault of our education system. We learn about World War II in World History and AP US History, and [yet] we don’t learn about the Holocaust,” Harris said.

Although the Holocaust was one of the largest genocides, Harris knows it is not the only one. Still, she hopes that awareness of its atrocities will prevent future pogroms.

“We need to know what the Holocaust is, and what happened, and how people survived, and why people [did] not survive,” Harris said. “There’s a reason that my [grandmother’s] entire family died; very few people can talk about one event that killed their whole family.”

The Holocaust has inflicted upon Harris maturity beyond her years. She thinks sometimes of what it would be like to confront death, to have her family confront death, and realizes how much she would sacrifice if she ever had to choose between herself and her loved ones. At just 17, she knows she would do anything for them.

“I would die for my family,” Harris said. “I would die so my sister could live.”