US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday spoke about his late stepfather’s role in the Bialystok ghetto uprising as he commemorated the 80th anniversary of the uprising.
In a video statement, Blinken explained how his late stepfather, Samuel Pisar, and his family were sent to different concentration camps after Nazi soldiers shut down the ghetto uprising.
“After crushing the revolt, the Nazis put the last of Bialystok’s Jews onto trains. Among them was my stepfather, Sam, then just thirteen years old, who was sent to Majdanek; his mother to Auschwitz; his little sister Freida likely to Theresienstadt,” said Blinken.
“How are we to understand this uprising eight decades later? I see it as one of countless acts of resistance by Jews in ghettos and Nazi German concentration camps across Europe – to reject their dehumanization, to reaffirm their dignity. Acts not of futility, but of bravery,” he continued.
“Acts like those of Sam’s father, David, who smuggled Jewish children out of the ghetto and weapons into it – for which he was eventually denounced to the Gestapo, and then tortured, killed, and thrown into a mass grave.”
“Acts like the decision of Sam’s mother, Helaina, made on the day they were deported – forcing her son to wear long pants instead of shorts, despite the blistering heat, so that he’d look more like a man than the boy he was, and so the Nazis would send him to a forced labor camp rather than to a death camp. He often said that, on that day, his mother gave him life for a second time,” said the Secretary of State.
“For Sam himself, there were many acts of resistance. Surviving in the ghetto; escaping twice after being sent to the gas chamber at Auschwitz – once by picking up a brush and pail and pretending he’d been sent to clean the floors; and, at dawn on a spring day in 1945, breaking away from a Nazi death march and into the arms of American GIs.”
“He never stopped resisting – by building a new life, a storied career, a family, and by relaying what he had endured from town halls to halls of power,” said Blinken.
Blinken thanked the city of Bialystok and its officials for recognizing this day, noting the importance of teaching the accurate history of the Holocaust in local schools.
“The United States will always be your partner in keeping this history alive,” Blinken said. “We’re taking another step in that effort by working with our Congress to invest $1 million to help create a virtual tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau so that more people who can’t visit can experience the indelible impact of seeing that site.”
“So on this day, I know [Pisar] would be especially moved to see not only his wife and two of his children in Bialystok, but also three of his five grandchildren — Arielle, David, Jeremiah — all doing their part to fulfill the enduring responsibility that, together, we inherit: to make real the command of ‘Never again,'” concluded Blinken.