Confront intolerance

On Oct. 26, I had the privilege to hear Zev Kedem tell his powerful story. As a child, Mr. Kedem was one of 1,100 people who appeared on Oskar Schindler’s list, and was therefore able to survive the Holocaust.

This program was part of Peace Week activities on the University of Maine campus with the theme, “Confronting Intolerance: How Do We Move from Oppression to Compassionate Justice.” The power of Kedem’s story moved me to tears and I spent the remainder of the evening trying to make sense of the incidences that have become part of our history in the last few days and weeks.

One of the many phrases of Kedem’s presentation that caught my attention was his need to maintain “silence for survival.” But we can no longer be silent. We must raise our voices, and each tell our own stories. In sharing our stories we become human, not like the dehumanization practiced in the concentration camps. Not like the dehumanization of a young man who became a scarecrow in a Wyoming field, and certainly not like the violence of raising a gun to put a bullet through a man in front of his family in the sanctity of his own home.

We must confront intolerance. Not with the power of violence, but the power there is in telling our own stories. Suzanne Brunner Bangor