In late January, 100 people gathered to honor Mandel as her final term there expired. It was her history as
the child of a concentration camp survivor that first sent her there.
One of Mandel's duties was to publicly light candles in an annual service held on the Day of Remembrance
for Holocaust victims, which this year falls today.
Mandel says the ceremony has always had special meaning for her because, "I'd find myself thinking about
my father's family. They were entirely wiped out . . . my paternal grandparents, uncles and cousins."
Sitting recently in the book-filled living room of the Princeton Borough home she shares with her husband, a
teacher at Princeton High School, Mandel begins her harrowing saga of survival. It began in 1939, when
she was 8 months old.
Mandel has no way of knowing whether she looked up and saw the shores of America when she was an
infant in her mother's arms on the deck of the German ship SS St. Louis.
Its now-infamous journey was made in May 1939 by 930 fleeing Jews, who believed they were escaping
Hitler's Third Reich. Among them were Mandel's parents, her father already a survivor of months in the
Dachau concentration camp.
All but 22 on board were turned away from Cuba, the ship's first port. The remaining passengers were then
refused entry to the United States. The ship returned to Europe, where 92 percent of its passengers would
die in concentration camps.
Mandel has called it a "journey to nowhere."
Lea and Michael Blumenstock, Mandel's parents, were among the small group of fortunate shipboard
travelers admitted to England.
Her father, a successful merchant in Vienna, supported the family by picking potatoes and tulips, then
served with the British military until the war's end. When Mandel was 9, they emigrated to America.
"What happened to us was not something we talked about, except in the privacy of our family," Mandel
says.
But in the late 1980s, Mandel read about the pending creation of a Holocaust Museum in Washington,
D.C., and a search for artifacts from the voyage of the St. Louis for one of its exhibits.
She still had photos of her father in front of one of the ship's life preservers and of both her parents on
deck, with her in a baby carriage.
Mandel contacted the museum planners, donated the photos, and became involved in its outreach to
survivors and their families.
In 1991, then President George H.W. Bush appointed her to the museum's governing body, and, in 1993,
President Clinton named her vice chairwoman of its board.
Three years later, Mandel led the creation of the Museum's Committee on Conscience, which calls
"attention to conflicts that either were or looked like they would become genocides."
In 1999, when the exhibit on the voyage of the St. Louis finally opened, Mandel spoke about it in the Capitol
Rotunda. Describing herself as bearing witness, she said the Holocaust Museum carries the central
message that, "What you see here, can happen."
Since then, Mandel, an author and frequent speaker, has juggled her duties at Eagleton with trips to
Washington to participate in museum development and affairs.
Mandel often speaks to journalists and school groups because, "I have come to believe in the importance
of preserving memory . . . educating new generations about the events of history."
But she says she and the members of the Committee on conscience also have "a passionate desire to do
something to prevent genocide.
"We must call the attention of the world and its leaders, not only to memorializing past genocides, but to
what is happening today. One of the messages after the Holocaust was `We didn't know.'
"The implication was that if the world had known, something would have been done. Now we see that
knowing doesn't mean it can or could be prevented. So our obligation is to call attention, to alert and alarm
the world."
The committee lately has tried to bring attention to the horrors of Sudan, Bosnia and Rwanda."While we still don't have evidence that the human community knows how to stop genocide, the obligation
to try is imperative," she adds.
Mandel's retirement from the Museum's Holocaust Council, she says, came as a result of President George
W. Bush's decision not to reappoint anyone already serving. While Mandel feels that "robs us of a certain
continuity and energy," she intends to keep speaking out, writing about, giving testimony and bearing
witness to what she believes is people at their very worst, the perpetrators of genocide.
She is convinced that, "Erasing it would be the most glorious goal." |
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