A Race to Preserve the Voices of Holocaust's Last Survivors

Simon Gronowski was a child when he jumped off a train heading to Auschwitz, after being held in Belgium (Cédric Gerbehaye for The Wall Street Journal)

As Witnesses Die, Historians Find Reality of Tragedy Harder to Convey

By Naftali Bendavid, WSJ
Dec. 5, 2013 10:30 p.m. ET

JEMEPPE-SUR-SAMBRE, Belgium—Simon Gronowski, an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor, mesmerized schoolchildren in this small town recently with a detailed account of jumping off a train to Auschwitz and hiding from the Nazis for three years.

The students lobbed close to 50 questions at him, ranging from the unsophisticated—"Did you meet Hitler ?"—to the sensitive, like his feelings about losing the mother and sister who stayed on the train.

But the talk exhausted Mr. Gronowski. His knees bother him, he doesn't hear that well, and it isn't clear how much longer he can deliver such talks, though he has no plans to stop. "My children and my grandchildren will talk about it," he said. "I can't do any more than I'm doing."

Mr. Gronowski's plight underlines an increasingly urgent problem facing those seeking to memorialize the Holocaust: Nearly seven decades after World War II ended, the final survivors are aging and dying off, making it immensely harder to convey the tragedy's reality, which has become only more engraved in public sentiment since a large trove of Nazi-confiscated artworks was recently disclosed.

(More here.)