Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
Print Edition

Fanny Starr, 1922-2020

When the Intermountain Jewish News interviewed Fanny Starr six years ago, we asked her why she was putting forth so much effort to tell the story of her Holocaust experiences, and those of her many loved ones who could not do so because they didn’t survive.

Her reply came readily and clearly: “It’s not just me,” she said. “It’s what six million me’s went through.”

Those 11 words could serve as an epitaph for Fanny Starr, who passed away October 30 at the age of 98. The obligation she felt to bear witness to the massive brutality was the central theme in her near century of life. Even as the years took their inevitable toll, she stood before schoolchildren, Christians, Jews and anyone else willing to lend an ear, and told her story.

It was a heartbreaking story, not an easy one to tell even once, let alone the hundreds of times as she resolutely did — a story of the cruel deprivations of Nazi-mandated ghettos, of forced labor, ultimately of the death camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

The story of virtually her entire family, who were systematically murdered.

The story of her husband Zesa, who underwent many of the same horrors she endured, and who shared her commitment to bearing witness before his own passing in 1998.

But chiefly, and unfailingly, the story of millions of Jews and others whose lives were cruelly cut short.

Starr never put it in precisely these words, but it was clear from her decades of testimony that she considered the price of her survival an absolute obligation to speak on behalf of those victims and, perhaps even more crucially, on behalf of people who might have been victims of other genocides, past, present and future.

This is why, as one of her last acts of Holocaust activism, she pushed so hard for the passage of Colorado’s Holocaust and Genocide Education in Public Schools bill, which became law earlier this year. On July 8, when Governor Jared Polis signed the bill, Starr stood by his side and accepted the honor of putting her own signature on the document.

Upon hearing of her death, Polis said:

“Fanny Starr sought light in the darkness and the world has lost a giant. Fanny visited schools for decades to tell her story and the stories of the countless lives and families destroyed, and the generations that never came to be.”

Yes, Fanny Starr was a giant, a pillar of memory and a symbol of strength, and deserves to be remembered as such, but she was also a simple human being, as vulnerable as anyone to the physical, psychological and spiritual harm that evil people are determined to visit upon the innocent.

Her eyes reflected the infinite sadness and loss, fear and pain, of a survivor. At the same time, they were eyes that shone with a profound respect for life and peered into a future in which the suffering she knew might never be known again. Her eyes sparkled with a powerful determination to make that dream a reality.

Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News




Leave a Reply