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“If I run into Ahmadinejad I would ask him to deny to me, who was in front of the concentration camp´s ovens, in my face that the Holocaust didn\’t exist”, Schejne María Laskier de Rus, best known as Sara Rus, challenged. This woman did not only survived the Auschwitz tragedy but also his son´s disappearance during the last military dictatorship in Argentina.
The Jewish News Agency decided to ask her about the next visit of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Brazil to participate in the United Nation\’s Rio Conference on sustainable development.
“I can´t express with words how the condemn can be. The thing is that hatred doesn´t enter my life. I don´t feel hatred, i just feel an enormous pain because nowadays there are characters like this person, this guy, because he is not a sir for me, that doesn\’t recognize the Holocaust knowing what we all have suffered”, says Sara, without changing her tone.
In that moment she remembers the days lived in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and the recent experience of going there once more during the March for Life. “I step on this land where I was cornered, naked and with an undignified life, I was in the floor of Birkenau”, she adds.
Born in Lodz, Poland, in 1927, Sara had a normal life with her parents, Jacobo and Carola Laskier, going to school and studying violin until in 1939 the Nazis arrived to the city.
The childhood in the Lodz ghetto, the life in Auschwitz and the suffering of having lost part of her family seemed enough, but in Argentina she suffered the disappearance of his son Daniel, who was kidnapped in July, 1977.
“A person that has survived so many misfortunes like me can´t have hatred. The hatred is the destruction of the human being and I feel it that way. I ask and demand justice, and justice must arrive to the people. That´s what I feel. There are people who doesn\’t believe in the realities we have lived in flesh and blood and that is terrible”, says Sara, who in 2008 received the Azucena Villaflor Award given by the National Government and was declared distinguished citizen of Buenos Aires in 2010.
– Sara, what would happen if you run into Ahmadinejad?
– I would only ask him one question. I have basically stepped out of the ovens in the concentration camps, how does he explain that the Holocaust never existed? Let him deny that in my face. I was front of the ovens, and I was very close of getting killed and burned. But for some reason I got out alive and y can tell what counts more, that´s why I would ask him to deny it to my face.
Sara leaves a clear position that she isn\’t looking for revenge for those who made her feel so much pain and humiliation. “If I killed someone I would be a murderer just like them, and I never put my self in that position”, she says.
For Sara the key is to ask for justice and punishment for the guilty. “We have many people in Argentina and all over the world that listens to this claim. In Germany they are demanding that these things never happen again. That´s why the fight is for the life and justice, and that´s the most important thing”.